Gary Lineker was loved by many viewers as sport's 'Mr Nice Guy' with an amiable wit - but was increasingly loathed for his self-righteous sanctimony and political posturing

Daily Mail​

20-05-2025

'No More Mr Nice Guy' ran the tagline of an advert for Walkers crisps that tickled the nation 30 years ago. Now it's as stale as a packet of cheese-and-onion from the 1990s.
To the equally cheesy strains of Peters and Lee singing Welcome Home, the ad featured former England football captain Gary Lineker returning to his native Leicester, after two years' playing football in Japan.
He shook hands with fans, joined a lads' kickabout in the street, kissed babies . . . then snatched a child's bag of crisps and scarpered. 'A crisp as irresistible as Walkers?' chuckled Hugh Laurie 's voiceover, before delivering that perfect line: 'There's no more Mr Nice Guy.'
Three decades later, that image of the best-liked bloke in sport, the clean-cut hero, is unrecognisable. Lineker is one of the most divisive figures in the country, loathed by many for his sanctimonious and self-righteous pronouncements on Left-wing issues from immigration to the war in Gaza.
He may never have received a yellow card as a player, but as a pundit he has received repeated warnings and even a suspension from his Match Of The Day employers for his aggressive and often offensive political statements.
Now it appears that, with an inevitable red card looming, he has opted to quit the BBC before they could send him off.
Despite his undoubted expertise as an analyst of the game, and his professional ease in front of the camera, millions will be delighted to see him go. The most highly paid presenter at the Corporation, with a £1.35 million salary last year, he has consistently flouted BBC guidelines that oblige its staff to maintain a show of political neutrality.
Lesser names have been ousted for such breaches: Carol Vorderman was relieved of her job as a BBC Radio Wales presenter in 2023 for repeatedly venting her spleen at the Conservative government on social media.
BBC cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew begged him: 'Please observe BBC editorial guidelines and keep your political views, whatever they are and whatever the subject, to yourself. I'd be sacked if I followed your example.' Lineker hit back: 'Jonathan, I'll continue to tweet what I like and if folk disagree with me then so be it.'
He appeared to be untouchable. After one provocation, in which he said the rhetoric of then home secretary Suella Braverman over immigration was, 'not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the '30s,' he was temporarily suspended from Match Of The Day, which he has fronted since 1999.
But the power he wielded within the sports department was revealed when none of his colleagues was willing to come on as a substitute for him.
Co-presenters including another former England captain, Alan Shearer, then refused to appear on the programme without him. When the boycott spread to other sports shows, BBC chiefs buckled. Lineker was welcomed back, smugly triumphant.
The support of his colleagues could be seen as the loyalty of a team united behind their champion, of course. But it felt more like self-preservation, by people who feared Lineker's retribution much more than they worried about fulfilling their contractual obligations to the Beeb. If his own ties to the BBC ever held him back from voicing inflammatory opinions, they no longer will. Indeed, it's likely he will now be even more outspoken – with a vested interest in controversy.
Since 2018, when he began hosting a football talk show online called Behind Closed Doors, the podcast company he co-founded, Goalhanger, has expanded rapidly. It is now one of the dominant names in the new industry – a factor, no doubt, in his decision to leave the BBC.
With 13 titles including the chart-topping The Rest Is... series, Goalhanger podcasts net more than 40 million audio and YouTube downloads a month. .
Goalhanger's latest accounts show its assets more than tripled to £1.9 million in the 12 months to May last year.
Lineker shared a now-deleted post which originated with pro-Palestine group Palestine Lobby
Among the Nazis' depictions of Jewish people as rats was this poster produced by Adolf Hitler's regime during their 1940s occupation of Denmark
Rumours have circulated for many years that the real Lineker was not the self-deprecating, amiable fellow viewers knew.
On camera, he combined the knowing wit of his predecessor, Des Lynam, with unflappability – always ready with a quip, rolling his eyes with amused weariness when something went wrong on air. In 2016, he had the good grace to keep a bet he made with himself, after his former club Leicester City achieved the impossible by winning the Premier League. He'd joked that if that ever happened, he'd present Match Of The Day 'in just my undies'.
Challenged by Leicester East's Labour MP Keith Vaz in the Commons, the then prime minister David Cameron agreed that 'absolutely' Lineker should keep his promise. Delighted, the presenter tweeted: 'It seems @David_Cameron is keen to see me in my pants. If that's what does it for you, Prime Minister . . .'
Sure enough, as the new season began, Lineker appeared in the studio wearing nothing but a thong necklace and a pair of white boxer shorts emblazoned with the Leicester City badge.
Breakfast TV presenter Dan Walker joked that Lineker's vanity had obliged him to do '4,000 sit-ups a day' before baring his torso. That proved the high point of the public's love affair with Lineker, one that dated back to the World Cup of 1986 when he was top scorer at the tournament in Mexico, bagging six goals in five games (including a hat-trick) and winning the Golden Boot.
Even people with no interest in football fell for his charm at the 1990 World Cup in Italy. In the semi-final against Germany, his team-mate Paul Gascoigne picked up a disastrous yellow card.
Knowing this meant that, even if they won the game, he would be barred from the final, Gazza was in tears. Lineker signalled to manager Bobby Robson on the bench that they needed to keep an eye on his friend. That spirit of sportsmanship seemed to matter much more than England's ultimate defeat in a penalty shoot-out.
Lineker later quipped: 'Football is a simple game – 22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and, at the end, the Germans win.'
However in recent years the star has waded into political debates, such as his tweet from 2023 which compared ministers' language over migration to 'Germany in the 30s'
Mrs Braverman said at the time she felt that Mr Lineker's remarks comparing her policies to Nazi Germany were 'disappointing'
However Gary Lineker told Amol Rajan that he had the right to give his views despite impartiality rules and said he was 'right' to criticise Suella Braverman and the Tories over their immigration polices
Good humour, fair play and old-fashioned decency – little surprise that advertisers wanted a slice of that. The only shock was that, when Lineker played against type as a crisp thief, the joke worked so well. Walkers marketing boss Martin Glenn, who offered the star a £200,000 deal, said: 'It was a big risk for us but it's the best thing we did.' Glenn later became CEO of the Football Association.
Public affection also went a long way when Lineker began his career as a pundit. At first he was a pitchside reporter, chatting excitedly to camera with his back to the pitch. His enthusiasm was puppyish, a contrast to the urbane nonchalance of Lynam.
But he learned to temper his style quickly. No one ever said Gary Lineker was slow off the mark, either as a footballer – where his pace and intelligence meant he could be in the right place to tap the ball into the net – or when threading a career path through the treacherous world of television.
Still, for the first few years, he was so little employed that he had time to hone his golf swing, playing off a handicap of four. Feathers were ruffled in 2005 when he was appointed the BBC's golf presenter. Veteran commentator Peter Alliss sniped, 'He's very good at reading the autocue,' before implying that Lineker wished he was good enough to be competing, not watching.
When he strayed from the autocue, he could be prone to gaffes. As the face of the BBC's 2012 Olympics coverage, he drew complaints from viewers after sniggering with designer Stella McCartney about British diver Tom Daley's 'little thing'.
And despite his noisy support for Arabs against Israelis in recent years, he exposed his ignorance of Islam while commentating on a Champions League game between Montpellier and Schalke in 2011. 'A terrific effort from Karim Ait-Fana,' he burbled. 'He scored from just outside the area and then ate grass... as you do.'
In fact, the devout Muslim had gone down on his knees and pressed his forehead to the earth, to thank Allah and pray. Lineker was barely repentant. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'but I'm not aware of every player's religion.'
By then, it had long been obvious that many at the Corporation actively disliked him. When he and his wife of 20 years, Michelle, divorced in 2006, rumours of his dalliances were rife. 'He is a terrible flirt,' one unnamed colleague whispered. 'If there is a pretty girl, Gary will make a beeline. He is very solicitous.'
Other rumours linked him to celebrities including Ulrika Jonsson and actress Cherie Lunghi, as well as Eimear Montgomerie, the ex-wife of golfer Colin. All these stories were emphatically denied, and there is no suggestion that infidelity was the cause of Lineker's marriage break-up.
He and Michelle had four sons, and had won the sympathy of the nation when their eldest child, George, was treated for leukaemia as a baby in 1991. But Harry Thompson, the producer of They Think It's All Over, who died in 2005, remarked that he was taken aback by the attention the star paid to female researchers and make-up artists. Joey Barton, also a footballer turned pundit, tweeted that Lineker had a 'vast closet of skeletons'.
A much more revered figure, former Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, bristled when Lineker accused him of being childish in a dispute with the BBC. 'Gary Lineker says I'm childish,' the Scot snarled. 'Well, he should know about that – he's been subjected to a lot of stuff in the media himself and I know he's had stuff stopped from getting in newspapers. So he'll understand what childish means.'
Some of the 'stuff in the media' included reports of racy texts exchanged with former BBC sports presenter Tara Stout. A few months later, she was back in the headlines for streaking through Soho in nothing but a pair of bikini bottoms, as a protest against a threatened eviction notice.
For Lineker, the embarrassment of all this was followed by more sexy texts made public. Lineker, then 45, became close to a blonde PR girl, 23-year-old Kate Hallam. They were seen sharing candlelit dinners in London restaurants, and she spent nights at his bachelor apartment in Surrey.
But the friendship ended abruptly after she allowed a pal to see some of the saucy messages from Lineker. In one, he compared a sex act to a Chinese takeaway. He sent her a sharp rebuke: 'You have obviously been indiscreet with your friends,' and broke off contact.
Shortly after that, he met lingerie model Danielle Bux, 18 years his junior at 26. They married in 2009, though this hardly meant settling down – for his 52nd birthday celebrations, he ended up at Stringfellows strip club in the West End. The marriage didn't last. Danielle wanted children and Lineker flatly refused. After seven years, they divorced.
His divorce with the BBC has been coming for a lot longer. So far, it has been icily polite, with most of the acrimony hidden behind closed doors.
Whether it stays that way remains to be seen.