What is it like being Gary Lineker? “You know, that’s a really difficult question to answer,” Gary Lineker said when I visited him at home in west London, “because I am Gary Lineker. So, therefore, what it’s like being me, it’s normal, if you see what I mean.”
But being Gary Lineker is not normal by anyone’s measure. His career has been one of continuous success. He is the former star England football striker who after retirement became a BBC institution and its highest-paid presenter and, more recently, a podcast impresario, co-founder of Goalhanger, the independent production group whose The Rest Is… podcast series is among the most successful in the world.
There have been dark shadows, however. His first-born son, George, was seriously ill as a baby with leukaemia, and Lineker is twice divorced. “But by and large,” he told me, “I’ve had it good – I’ve had it really good. I often think, ‘Why me? Why me? Why me?’ I was blessed with a skill to play football.”
Lineker recalls how his life changed completely after the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, at which he won the Golden Boot as the tournament’s highest scorer, although England lost 2-1 in the quarter-final to the eventual winners Argentina – the match in which Diego Maradona punched the ball into the net, the so-called hand of God goal. (Steve Hodge, the former England midfielder, later sold at auction the shirt Maradona had worn in that game for £7.1m.)
Shortly after the Mexico World Cup, Lineker signed for Barcelona, then coached by Terry Venables, the most astute and inspiring coach Lineker says he ever played under. Nowadays, he can’t leave his house or travel on public transport, which he does regularly, without being stopped, or smiled at, or asked for a selfie.
“What would be more difficult to explain was if all that stopped,” he told me. “You’d go: ‘That’s not normal any more!’”
Of his upcoming departure from Match of the Day, he said: “I’m flummoxed as to why it’s such a big deal. I’m just the presenter of a football highlights show.”
But he knows he is much more than that. His interventions on social media on some of the most polarised political conflicts of our times – Brexit, the refugee crisis, climate change – have ignited media firestorms of indignation and disapproval. One such storm, after Lineker denounced the Conservative government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, led to his suspension from Match of the Day in March 2023, the programme he has presented since 1999.
In solidarity with their friend, pundits Alan Shearer and Ian Wright boycotted the show as that weekend live sports programmes across BBC networks were truncated or taken off air as the conflagration spread. Jon Holmes, Lineker’s longtime confidant and agent (“my second father”), was called in to make peace. He expertly cooled the temperature, negotiated with Tim Davie, the BBC director-general, and Lineker returned to our screens, baffled but not chastened.
“I got tearful when Ian and Alan did that,” Lineker says now of the debacle, “because they didn’t have to. I didn’t ask them, I didn’t expect it, but it was beautiful.”
As Lineker spoke, his eyes behind his Prada spectacles filled with tears and he peered out the window at the rough common land that surrounds his imposing, high-ceilinged house. We were sat on a sofa in his sitting room, close to a table on which a microphone he uses for The Rest Is Football podcast was positioned. Filbert – a Siberian Husky cross rescue dog, familiar from paparazzi shots of Lineker setting off for walks with the media camped outside his house – lay at his feet on the wooden floor as we chatted.
Being Gary Lineker also means being the subject of endless media scrutiny and persistent low-level sniping and abuse. When news dribbled out recently that he would stand down from Match of the Day at the end of the season – was he pushed by Alex Kay-Jelski, the BBC’s ambitious new head of sport, or did he choose the moment of his own departure? – another round of hostile media stories commenced. The news received as much prominence as the resignation of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury – which tells us, Lineker said, that “football’s the proper religion!” Boom, boom.
On proposed changes to the format of Match of the Day – which he still enjoys presenting, despite the travel back and forth to the BBC studios in Manchester, where it is broadcast live late on Saturday night – Lineker cautioned against them. The highlights show was founded in 1964 and he says it is “a mainstay for a lot of people in this country in terms of watching Premier League football, the one place where they can get their Premier League fix”.
He will continue after the end of the season to present coverage of live football on the BBC, his contract ending at the 2026 World Cup. “Linear TV is changing,” he said. “The new head of sport, Alex, wants to shuffle it up a bit, so if you’re going to do that, you might as well do it with someone new. I’m feeling good about [my departure]. It’s nice that it’s out there now.”
Lineker claims not to read what is written about him just as he chose as a player – for Leicester City, Everton, Barcelona, Spurs and England – not to seek out match reports unless he’d had a good game and scored. “But people tell you, so you get to hear. If you take a bit of social media – and it’s always the same people – and a couple of newspapers – and it’s always the same newspapers – you start to realise that it’s really only a tiny minority of people that hate you, and it’s generally those that are far right.”
But why should being Gary Lineker mean being hated at all? His on-screen persona – which has evolved after a nervous start sitting alongside and observing Des Lynam suavely orchestrate proceedings in the Match of the Day studio – is welcoming (“Thank you for joining us this evening”), conversational, relaxed and humorous. He has cross-generational appeal and Match of the Day, he points out, is always at the top of the most-watched programmes on BBC iPlayer.
In person, Lineker is not grand, garrulous or overly assertive. He is rather self-deprecating and likes quips (some of his jokes even land) but he is also reflective, looks you directly in the eye and listens carefully. Our photographer, Chris Floyd, who arrived at the house before me, even found him a “little wistful and melancholy”.
Matthew Syed, the columnist and writer, has a theory on why Lineker is hated: jealousy. “In many ways, you could say he is one of the most successful individuals in the UK, a master in the art of reinvention,” he said. “No wonder people despise him, at least judging by my social media feed (another forum that Lineker got to early, learned about and then came to dominate).”
Lineker accepts jealousy plays a part in how he is treated. “I think it’s inevitable. It is part of human beings, particularly British people: if you go to America, they’ve got a totally different view of their sporting heroes. It’s been led by the right-wing press: they don’t seem to like me very much and I seem to live in the Mail’s head, and they write pieces on me nearly every day, which is bizarre.”
Later, he said: “What you’ve got to remember is that as footballers we get used to getting a bit of stick… people chanting ‘Gary Lineker, you’re a wanker’ – especially when it’s the home fans!” Boom, boom.
“But the Daily Mail’s infatuation, I don’t know if it’s anything sexual or anything like that!” He laughed.
Lineker was radicalised by Brexit – or politicised is perhaps more accurate. He recalls being invited to a small private dinner with Michael Gove at which the then senior Conservative politician made the case for leaving the European Union. “I remember saying to Gove, halfway through the meal, ‘This sounds just like the plan you use to become the next leader of the Tory party, the next prime minister.’ He went: ‘I can look at you now and categorically tell you that there is absolutely no chance I will ever run for prime minister.’ Brexit happens and he’s running for prime minister! Politicians, I mean, really?”
After the Gove dinner, Lineker began to read seriously about the European Union and the potential effects of Brexit. “I needed to do my homework, and I started to do a lot on what it means. I just thought, ‘Christ, this would be a nightmare.’”
He then took to X, then Twitter, after some deliberation, to announce he would vote Remain. After which the gates of hell opened on him: he had become a belligerent in the culture wars, which he seemed to relish. His comments seemed performative. He had become what John Gray would call an ultra-liberal.
“Gary is living his life backwards,” one friend said. “As he gets older, he sounds more and more like a student.” Even Syed, who admires Lineker, says his political views are “lazy and superficial. There is little willingness to challenge his own core assumptions or think through implications… I’d often wince when reading his feed. In a strange way, all the practice and insight he applied to the social world seemed absent in his engagement with the political one.”
Lineker does not consider himself to be a cultural warrior, a provocateur, or as someone who is even that political. He’s not an activist. He calls himself, instead, a “humanitarian” and has no interest in religion. “It’s bonkers that anyone believes in anything like that. We don’t understand how we’re here,” he said, peering out the window again and gesturing up at the clear, blue, late autumn sky.
“The fact we’re here is miraculous. What we needed to do was give it a story and why [the world] was made – I think they’re [religions are] the biggest conspiracy theories in history! But that’s just my view and I perfectly respect people’s rights to believe whatever they believe. Scientists have explained so much and learned so much more. They understand sort of how it started – but how did it start before that? It’s like madness, but is it some bloke with a white beard in the clouds?”
What matters to Lineker are other human beings – and their plight, here on Earth. “Imagine if it happened here,” he said to me, his tone hardening. “Imagine if we were a country that was being bombed and suddenly you’ve got to flee with anything that you can grab and try [to] live somewhere else because you’re going to get killed. Imagine if that happened and you had to take massive risks to cross a continent, including boat trips that are really precarious and dangerous – because you had got no real choice. And then eventually, when you get somewhere, they really don’t want you, they can’t stand you and they want you out. I just looked at it from their perspective and, yes, you can’t take everyone but we should take our fair share, as should all nations around the world, because it’s only going to get worse, with climate change and wars.”
He does not regret comparing Conservative policy on migration to 1930s Germany. “It just seemed awful. It was illegal, in the end. But I just can’t see how you can do something like that. What human being acts to a fellow human being in that way?”
He thinks the BBC is gripped by fear of the right-wing press and over-reacted by suspending him. “They recognise that now. It was a very surreal few days. I wasn’t stressed by it – because that’s my personality. But I found it intriguing, amusing and baffling, because I thought: ‘This is over me replying to someone who has taken a real dig at me, in civil language, and all of a sudden… that tweet would only have been seen by a few people. I did the reply and woke up in the morning and I’d got, like, 300 messages on my phone. It was basically orchestrated by the Daily Mail, saying I’d accused the Tory government of being Nazis – which was far from the truth. I just said some of the language they are using is not dissimilar to that used in the 1930s in Germany, which was correct, factually correct. Then it just blew up from there. Even if I’d been wrong – and I don’t think I was, and I still don’t – it would have been still over the top.”
He called Tim Davie and urged him “not to appease the Daily Mail”, as he puts it. “That’s where the BBC sometimes has a failing. It’s a little bit terrified of the BBC-haters. They will always hate it regardless. Stop worrying about them and focus on all the people that love the BBC. It’s an incredible service: it’s an institution that’s respected across the globe.”
That the corporation, occupying a space in public life between the state and the market, aspires to be impartial, “especially in these times when everything is so divisive”, is what Lineker most respects about the institution. “I don’t think we support ourselves enough [at the BBC], and we get scared about what the haters think.”
He also acknowledged that the BBC is in an existential struggle for relevance in an age of proliferating streaming services and media fragmentation. The case for the licence fee will have to be made afresh. “There might be some form of change in the model of funding, I’m only guessing. It’s difficult. When they change it, how do they change it? Do you make it subscription? But in ten years’ time, who knows how our viewing will be. But it’s worth preserving in whatever way we can.”
He cannot understand why some Conservatives are hostile to the ethos of public service broadcasting. “Conserve it. My dad was a Tory. That’s what Conservatism is – conserving things, surely! Why would you want to lose the BBC, the thing that is so incredibly respected around the world?”
He resents how, as Conservative culture secretary, John Whittingdale – a hard right-winger – forced the BBC to publish presenters’ salaries (the talent, as they are known). “I was annoyed about that fact. Who wants their salaries published? And every July, I hide behind the sofa, because I’m going to get it. And the reality is, I’ve been at the BBC a long time. I’m not obsessed [with] money. Because if I was at another channel, I’d been earning a lot more. I had plenty of approaches over the years, plenty of offers. I just felt a loyalty to the BBC, so I kind of stuck it out.”
I asked Lineker if he understood why, as a senior BBC presenter whose salary is paid for by the licence fee, his comments on social media angered so many on the right. Apart from his Brexit intervention, he said that his comments were “not political but humanitarian”. Nor as a sports presenter were there any BBC restrictions on what he could say back then; they were introduced later in response to various scandals.
“At that point, there was no issue about BBC presenters saying what they wanted, unless you were in news and current affairs. Then they started to change the rules. You say, ‘Well, hang on, you’ve moved the goalposts. Now what am I supposed to do, just say nothing?’ After that, I was very careful about doing anything politically, but on the humanitarian issues, I could carry on.” Until he couldn’t – because the guidelines were rewritten again after his suspension in March 2023.
Reflecting on his career as a footballer, Lineker believes that he lacked empathy. “I was focused on football, so driven, so ambitious. It consumed my life to an extent that you just cared about scoring goals.” And he scored a lot of them.
He says he became “more empathetic” after he had children and because of George’s illness. “You start having different perspectives on life – football finishes. Looking back at the me when I was young, I wouldn’t have cared about things that you start to care about in life as you get older. And the transition began in the public domain because of social media.”
When he began using Twitter (he now calls X “shitter”), Lineker asked himself: “‘What do I do with this?’ Well, tell people what you are. And the following, it grew and grew really quickly.”
He now seldom uses the platform except for promotional and occasionally charitable purposes. “It’s just gone down the toilet. It was never a truly friendly place anyway, but now it’s utterly awful, since Musk has ruined it.”
Lineker monitors events in the Middle East and the war in Gaza. He follows on Instagram a ten-year-old girl named Renad Attallah who lives in the besieged Strip and posts about her life there. He has spoken before of how pictures and footage of people’s suffering inside the Strip have made him “cry on a regular basis”.
“They still do,” he told me. “It’s just got worse and worse, hasn’t it? There’s nothing we can do. You feel a bit helpless. I mean, it’s awful. I don’t know how you can be on a side on this, other than the side of the children and the side of the women and the innocent people that are being killed constantly now. Yes, same sympathies on October 7, and before October 7 there were things that happened, but what’s going on now is just…”
His voice faded and he lowered his head. He mentioned Attallah again. “If something happened to her” – his eyes filled with tears – “I’d genuinely… she’s a brilliant little chef, and so sweet, you think [he whispers]: ‘Fuck, how could people kill these people? How can they do that? How can you even contemplate – it’s fucking awful.”
I ask him if he has ever messaged her on Instagram.
“You can, yes, and I’ve donated and stuff like that, because she’s brilliant. She’s become more than an influencer – she’s got four, five million followers or something silly [in fact, she has just under one million], but you just think, ‘God, every night she goes to bed it might happen, or she gets shot in the street.’ It’s not about anti-Semitism – it’s about anti- the killing of innocent women, children and men as well. I just want it to stop.’”
His stance on the Israel-Gaza war has led to accusations that he is anti-Israeli and ignorant of the deeper context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. He pushed back. “I’m anti-Israel government. I’m not in the slightest bit anti-Semitic. I’m not anti-anybody. I am anti-bad people, and there are really bad people involved in this. Eventually, whether it’s five years’, ten years’, 20 years’ time, I think we’ll look at that and we’ll see it the same way as Iraq times ten. I do, I just genuinely do.”
As Lineker watches the suffering of victims of war and conflict everywhere, he believes the world has entered a “dark period”. And he regrets the British government is not more influential in the Middle East. “We’re a powerless little country really, now. You don’t know what’s going on behind the scenes, whether they’re trying. I’m sure they are: they must be. It’s easy to be critical when you don’t know what’s going on.”
We have wandered far from the Match of the Day studio now. Being Gary Lineker means that people ask him not just about football and the BBC but about some of the world’s defining issues – about war, geopolitics, the migration crisis, climate change. He has brought this on himself, perhaps, through his social media activity but also because he has a restless mind and does not avoid questions or offer stock, rehearsed replies: he speaks from the heart. In his later years as a footballer, he was already thinking about a career in broadcasting and used to hang out with journalists and ask them about their trade, how they worked and prepared, what they did. Fellow England players Chris Waddle and Paul Gascoigne used to call him “Junior Des”, after Lynam, whose wry, amused presentation style Lineker admired, studied and would in time emulate.
But we should end with football. I used to play a lot in childhood, but knew I would never be as good as I wanted to be. I would see other boys, however, who knew instinctively how to play, where to move, how to find space, how to run. They knew they were good. Some of the boys I played against in the Harlow recreational leagues in Essex became professionals, but never reached the summit of the game as Lineker did.
When did Lineker know he was good?
“As a boy I knew I was good – I was really quick,” he told me. “When I was 11, 12 years old, I scored something like 160 goals in a season, combined between my school and Sunday team. I was quicker than everyone else and a good finisher, so I got spotted by scouts. I went to Leicester at 12, trained every couple of days. But the kids there, I always thought, were better than me. I was tiny, 5ft 5in and nine stone, but I hadn’t reached puberty – I didn’t till I was 17. I used to hide in the showers and stuff. But as I got stronger, I improved. I didn’t get into the England team until I was 24. I wasn’t a [Wayne] Rooney or [Michael] Owen.”
During the recent European Championships in Germany, Lineker was criticised for calling Gareth Southgate’s England team “shit” on his The Rest Is Football podcast. Southgate later complained of the “dark atmosphere” around the team.
Asked who had criticised him, I told Lineker that I’d heard some of the senior England players were irritated by the comments, which were widely reported. “We saw them after the final,” he said of the players, “and they were fine. People try to create something where it actually isn’t there. Everybody was critical of England at the Euros, the way they were playing in the group games, the last 16, they were awful, really awful. It was so bad. It was shit. I never understand why people get offended. They don’t – maybe the Daily Mail do – but I think we were just honest.”
He admires Southgate as a communicator and diplomat but has not seen him since the end of the tournament. “He did a brilliant job in bringing the England team back to where they are respected and liked again by the public. But he’s a sort of underdog, defensive coach, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but with the quality of players we have, it’s the right time to change it.”
What Lineker appreciates most about modern football is what he considers to be its inclusivity. He does not deny racism exists in the game and he is not naively idealistic but, he says, “Look inside the dressing rooms: black guy, white guy, Asian, Muslim, Catholic – they all get on beautifully, because we’re humans. But we’re kind of forced to be against each other.”
Inadvertently he had moved seamlessly back to cultural politics or what he prefers to call humanitarian concerns, a constant preoccupation.
Being Gary Lineker means never being at rest. When he is not broadcasting or speaking about football, he is discussing future projects and podcasts, who and what might work and why, with Tony Pastor and Jack Davenport, his business partners at Goalhanger. “The hard thing is trying to find the right hosts, getting the kind of chemistry.”
He mentions the success of The Rest Is History podcast, presented by Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, both old friends of the New Statesman. The rapport between the two amiable historians contributes to its great attraction. “After a slow start,” Lineker said, the podcast has “millions, millions, tens of millions of listeners. It’s the world’s biggest history podcast and it’s probably not far off being the world’s biggest podcast. Their live shows, they’ve just sold out every venue they’ve been to in America.”
When they meet, Lineker, Pastor and Davenport marvel at the good luck of it all. “We often go out and have a few drinks and we go: ‘How the fuck is this, we’ve become these media moguls, almost, with influence!’ And it’s such fun. Everything else in my life I’ve done there’s been a negative side: when you’re a footballer, you get a bit; when you’re in the BBC, you get a bit, for obvious reasons. But suddenly, with this, you get stopped every day by people who say: ‘The Rest Is History is amazing.’ Or, “I love The Rest Is Politics.’ Or, ‘Oh, Gary, I want to thank you for The Rest Is Football.’ It’s nuts. I don’t believe in gods and stuff, as I told you, but I wonder if there’s a planet somewhere that’s got PlayStation and there’s someone playing me who’s a really good player! I’ve had the most amazing life. Because if I drop dead tomorrow – well, let’s get my birthday out of the way first, I’m 64 on Saturday [30 November] – I’m thankful to my PlayStation friend.”
This appears in the Christmas 2024 issue of the New Statesman magazine, on sale 6 December 2024 – 9 January 2025
[See also: Gregg Wallace and the revenge of the middle-class, middle-aged women]
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This article appears in the 05 Dec 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas and New Year Special 2024