Gary Lineker will have the last laugh over the talentless BBC

Gary Lineker will be exiting the BBC in 2026
Gary Lineker will be exiting the BBC in 2026 - Ian Walton/PA

So, farewell Gary Lineker. He’s been given the heave-ho by the BBC. That sound you can hear is the crowing of his haters. 
They’re cock-a-hoop that the woke irritant is out on his “jug ears”. You can already hear the chortles: “Stick to selling crisps!”

My advice to these people: keep the champers on ice. Yes, Lineker grated with all his preening tweets about the sheer awfulness of the Tories and Brexit and cruel border controls, yada yada.

But he knew his stuff about football. He was a suave guide to the beautiful game. Bear with me: might we miss him? We certainly wouldn’t be the only ones.

Lineker will quit Match of the Day at the end of this football season and leave the BBC entirely after the 2026 World Cup. 
His divorce from Auntie seems acrimonious: he says he was “open” to staying but the Beeb had other ideas. Apparently they want to give MOTD a facelift.

BBC stiffs giving yet another show a makeover never ends well. One need only look to what they did to A Question of Sport. They pushed out the superbly informed Sue Barker and her merry captains Phil Tufnell and Matt Dawson and replaced them with a gibbering Paddy McGuinness and sportspeople no one over 30 could name. Viewing figures duly collapsed, and the show was put out of its misery last year. Keep the scalpels off MOTD, please.

That was the weird thing about Lineker. He might have been irritating online, but on MOTD he was deeply knowledgeable, as befits a man who’s been either playing or thinking about football for nearly 50 years.

His exit speaks to the moribund state of the BBC. It’s part of a broader “name drain” exodus of talent. Scores of erudite or just plain fun old Beeb types have left in recent years, whether by choice or P45.

Think of who we’ve lost. The aforementioned Barker, Andrew Marr, clever Dan Walker. The intellectually fizzing Vanessa Feltz. Paul O’Grady (RIP), one of Auntie’s rare working-class voices, unceremoniously ousted from his Radio 2 slot in 2022. “Radio 2 has changed, it’s not what it was,” he said. It’s hard not to get the impression that applies to more than just one radio station.

We might not miss the likes of Emily Maitlis or Jon Sopel, but it’s telling the BBC couldn’t even hold on to big guns like them.

And now Mr Football is off. Is everyone of substance getting benched? Last month director-general Tim Davie said he has “kind of banned” the word “talent”. He says he wants to puncture the idea that any presenter is “indispensable”.

I’m now wondering if he bristles at talent because they have so little left. How fitting that that word is the great unsayable in the wasteland of expertise the BBC is becoming.

Yes, Lineker brought this on himself with his weekly mutinies against company impartiality. But his quick departure is to be lamented nonetheless.

It points to a crisis of purpose at the public broadcaster. What’s the betting the lost old guard will be replaced by even woker “fresh faces” who live on TikTok and have never heard of That Was The Week That Was.

Lineker will have the last laugh, though, as his podcast The Rest is Football will now be hosted on BBC Sounds as part of the new agreement.

No doubt he’ll become even more annoying now, out in the wild, free to fire his lukewarm takes at will. Thanks, Auntie.