Do we like Gary Lineker?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Mostly decent and vocal for refugees and trans people, with one real stain: sharing a post with an antisemitic image and apologising for it.
Gary Lineker is the Leicester-born former England striker who spent about 26 years fronting Match of the Day. By the end he was the BBC's face of football and also its loudest, most opinionated presenter, and that mix is what has kept getting him into trouble.
The first big stoush was in March 2023, when he criticised the government's immigration policy on social media. The BBC took him off air for a while, and the row ran on until he was back. Where you land depends on whether you think a presenter on a licence-fee payer's money should keep his politics to himself, or whether that was a bloke calling out cruelty.
The one that ended it was in May 2025. He reshared an Instagram story about Zionism that carried a rat image, which has long been used as an antisemitic insult, and he deleted it after the backlash. He said he'd missed it and called it an “oversight”. In his statement he said “I recognise the error and upset that I caused”. The BBC said he'd step back after the season, and he was out a year early.
The harm check comes out mixed but mostly clean. In the same week he told the Telegraph “It’s the Israeli government I’m critical of, not Jewish people.” His critics say his Gaza commentary, including calling Gaza an “outdoor prison”, went too far for a BBC presenter. His defenders say criticising a government is not the same as attacking a people, and that is the line he draws himself. On trans people he said they are “some of the most persecuted on the planet”, though he dodged questions on the FA's women's football ban.
Nothing I could find shows him pushing anti-vax, climate-denial or anti-migrant lines, and his record on refugees points the other way. In 2020 he said he'd host a refugee in his own home. It was a real act rather than a tweet, and he did it while copping plenty of stick from the right-wing press.
On money, he beat the taxman at first instance in 2023. A tribunal judge ruled that he was a freelancer with direct contracts, not an employee, in a £4.9 million dispute with HMRC, and found the IR35 rules did not apply. HMRC then lodged an appeal, and I couldn't confirm in a source I opened how that ended.