Match of the Day is a dying relic
Gary Lineker’s departure from Match of the Day feels extra like a defeat for the BBC and the programme than it does for Mr Football.
In the epoch of streaming and rapid consumption MOTD feels more and more like a relic of the analogue age, tucked away on a Saturday night time when its conventional viewers has nodded off and Gen X are on their approach out.
I imply, what’s the level of a highlights programme six hours after Saturday’s 3 o’clock kick-offs end when the objectives can be found on-line from 5.15pm? The Saturday matches are already the rump of the weekend litter with the massive ticket sellers often allotted a Sunday slot and others moved there to stability the crowded schedule.
The Saturday night time slot is wholly unsuited to a contemporary viewers steeped in social media and streaming tradition, for whom sitting in entrance of a tv set all night time has by no means been a goer. The format is frayed and drained.
Even Lineker’s nifty banter has to work tougher to maintain the viewers engaged, and, delivered as it’s by a greying 63-year-old many occasions faraway from the fresh-as-paint thirty-something who laid Des Lynam’s moustache to relaxation in 1999, this separation finally follows the standard sample. Time waits for no icon.
Programming, like the sport itself, has radically modified since Fergie dominated the earth and Manchester United have been a factor. The BBC’s new head of sport, Alex Kay-Jelski, reportedly noticed Lineker’s departure as a possibility to make his personal mark in addition to revamp the present. Except, the issue isn’t solely the format however the medium too.
The big-show TV vibe with its sequinned Saturday night time ambiance and shiny manufacturing values is completed. Lineker timed his departure like he did his arrival within the field, to the nano-second, to make his exit look extra like his choice than his formidable editor’s.
Though Lineker was understood to have been open to extending his MOTD contract past this season, that choice was shut down by the previous newspaper govt with a pointy knife trying to make the programme related to a youthful viewers and minimize the wage invoice at an organisation below fiscal stress.
Lineker is the BBC’s highest earner on £1.3m a yr. The contract extension he has negotiated takes him to the tip of the 2026 season, a remaining tour of obligation throughout which he’ll current the BBC’s protection of the FA Cup earlier than signing off on the World Cup within the United States, Canada and Mexico.
Sitting on a reported pension pot of £30m, Lineker is hardly bruised by the end result. Moreover, the Goalhanger podcast enterprise, of which Lineker is a joint-owner, is booming below the collective The Rest Is… banners, reaching 40m downloads a month. The plan is to push deeper right into a US market that’s 25 occasions the dimensions of the UK’s podcast world. Indeed 25 per cent of The Rest is History viewers is American already.
Freed from the constraints of his BBC publish, the place he’s anticipated to verify his liberal political orientation on the door, the podcast surroundings permits Lineker to criticise groups, as he did with England on the Euros, as typically as he desires, to specific his unease on the therapy of human beings as he did in his tweeted criticism of the federal government’s asylum coverage, and play extra golf.
Lineker’s playful allure, intelligence and perception has held MOTD collectively for longer than it would, nearly hanging on to relevance. However, the zeitgeist has moved on. Without Lineker, the forex of his sidekicks, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards, neither of whom have the wit or sparkle to hold the present, is diminished, begging the query of what Kay-Jelski would possibly do to hold on to market share.
The worth of the late-night Saturday TV slot had shrunk to such a level, the rights to MOTD fell to the BBC by default after ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 elected to not bid within the 2025-2029 pitch. And with Saturday’s match schedules set to shrink farther from subsequent season, a Lineker-lite MOTD faces a fair higher battle on a weight-reduction plan of Crystal Palace, Fulham and Brentford.
The second of Lineker’s parting is the BBC’s Budget second, so delicate it required systemic leaking to melt the blow. The situation featured on the BBC’S flagship 10 o’clock information with out official remark by the BBC or Lineker.
It was introduced as a conflict of personalities between two energy figures. Lineker walked away with one thing however misplaced the publish they are saying he was nonetheless joyful to steer. The BBC’s head of sport was seen as getting his approach, easing a legend into his dotage whereas saving a pile of cash. It’s an enormous gamble for Kay-Jelski, who is likely to be proper in recognising the necessity for change however is as powerless as Lineker to carry again the Gen Z forces finally deciding MOTD’s destiny.
