Pile-on weeks like this are becoming more frequent for Gary Lineker, host of the BBC’s flagship football programme, Match of the Day. The player, who was famously never shown a card during a 16-year professional football career, has again faced calls to be removed from the field of play.
The most recent perceived transgression was not unlike the last. It was a Tweet, this time a re-Tweet calling for Israel to be banned from international football “until it ends its grave violations of international law”.
To a certain segment of the right, there is nothing more egregious, more irritating, more treacherous than an uppity former footballer, a footballer that thinks and has opinions, a footballer who is articulate.
“Gary Lineker is an ill-informed, ignorant commentator on the Middle East,” Tory MP Andrew Percy told The Telegraph.
“When is the BBC going to say enough is enough. Gary, get off the air. Shut up and enjoy your taxpayer funded salary,” said political commentator Alex Armstrong on GB News.
Stephen Crabb, a former cabinet minister and the parliamentary chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel, said: “This is a deeply inappropriate tweet for any BBC figure to endorse, and especially for someone of Lineker’s prominence.”
UK defence secretary Grant Shapps condemned the posts and called for Lineker to “stick to football”. He added that the world would be a “better place” if Lineker didn’t air his views on social media.
Lineker took more flak back in December when he signed a letter calling for the end of the government’s Rwanda scheme. He called the migrant policy “immeasurably cruel” and compared the language around it to 1930s Germany. The net result was a triggering of politicians, pundits and people on the X (formerly Twitter) platform into another tailspin.
A trusted commentator and the highest paid presenter in the BBC, Lineker has 8.9 million followers, more than the last three UK Prime ministers – Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson – combined. Sunak has 2.3 million followers on X, Johnson 4.6 million and Truss 671,000.
Another aspect to Lineker that his detractors cannot diminish is that he isn’t just an ex-footballer but a generational player, a revered England captain, a winner of the Golden Boot award at the 1986 World Cup. He also did something that English players of that time rarely did – he went to play the game in foreign countries, mainly Spain and Japan.
As the Football365 website put it, in unvarnished fashion, Lineker “is proving as ruthless at taking down shitehawk Tories as he was around the six-yard box . . . he has become something of a national treasure, at least to everyone who isn’t an absolute bastard”.
It is no coincidence that amongst the many Lineker has successfully provoked, are some of the same characters who were untruthful about Brexit, immigration, Covid and Europe.
His persona on Match of the Day comes across as effortless with a self-deprecating, understated charm. He has always been the boy you could bring home and know your mother would like because he is “other era” reasonable, even a little straight.
Just how he has become a lightning rod for the right is a cultural phenomenon, as Lineker’s views are far from chum in the water and no more than commonly held and moderate. Even through the most partisan prism he is no malcontent firebrand. At the heart of his outpouring is a decency shared by people who do not have his platform. This week, in The Daily Mail and GB News, that was construed as an affront.
Lineker makes himself an easy target for the shut-up-and-keep-dribbling-brigade and many of those who have recently attacked him have done so falsely under the anti-Semitic banner rather than engage with what Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC outlined when she recently presented to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
“On average, 247 Palestinians are being killed and are at risk of being killed each day, many of them literally blown to pieces. They include 48 mothers each day. Two every hour. And over 117 children each day, leading Unicef to call Israel’s actions a war on children. Entire multigenerational families would be obliterated.”
Politicians don’t like to go there, go to the heart of the matter. It’s far easier to have a dig at a famous BBC presenter.
“They’ve borrowed from Lineker’s playbook. Labour are a party of goalhangers and left-wing strikers. That doesn’t work in politics. The country needs centre forwards, people who are prepared to put the hard work in and create opportunities. And it needs a team captain with a plan,” said Conservative politician Penny Mordaunt.
“Thank you for mentioning me in your clumsy analogy. I’m just happy to have been better in the 6-yard box than you are at the dispatch box. Best wishes,” replied Lineker.
On whatever side people fall, the chain of Tweets and the spittle-flecked reaction to them shows how far the cultural dial has moved and what a strangely alien place it has become, when the moderate views of a former footballer are considered subversive.
