Gary Lineker, the striker who was never booked until he picked up a microphone

Gary Lineker

Photo: Liton Ali / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 30, 1960 Leicester
Occupation	Footballer
Honours	Copa del Rey · UEFA Cup Winners' Cup
Individual awards	Officer of the Order of the British Empire · James Joyce Awards · Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Award for Sports Journalism

Gary Lineker spent his playing career in the most crowded, most kicked patch of grass in football, the few yards in front of goal, and walked away from it without a single caution from a referee. No yellow card, no red, in every competitive match he ever played. The man who then sat on the BBC‘s football sofa for a generation managed the opposite. He became the presenter the corporation kept warning, stood down once, and finally let go. A greengrocer’s son from Leicester learned to score without fouling anybody, then found that speaking his mind on television carried a cost the penalty area never charged.

That reversal is still unfolding. Lineker no longer works for a broadcaster that can take him off air: he co-owns the company that makes his show, and Netflix carries it.

He grew up helping on his father’s fruit and vegetable stall in Leicester Market, and for a while cricket looked the surer road: he captained Leicestershire schools through his teens. One teacher wrote on his report that he concentrated too much on football and would never make a living at it. His middle name, Winston, honours the wartime prime minister whose birthday he shares: 30 November, in Lineker’s case in 1960.

Leicester City gave him his debut on New Year’s Day 1979, and by 1984–85 he was the First Division’s joint top scorer. Everton bought him that summer. In one season at Goodison Park he scored 40 goals in 57 games and swept both player of the year awards, yet finished second to Liverpool in the league and the FA Cup final, the first sign of a pattern: personal brilliance, no league title.

Mexico in 1986 made him an international name. Lineker scored six goals at that World Cup, including a hat-trick against Poland, and became the first Englishman to win the Golden Boot. He also scored in the quarter-final against Argentina, the afternoon Diego Maradona settled with his hand and then with a run from his own half. That year he finished second in the Ballon d’Or. Terry Venables took him to Barcelona, where a hat-trick in a 3–2 win over Real Madrid made him a cult figure at the Camp Nou; he lifted the Copa del Rey and the Cup Winners’ Cup before Johan Cruyff’s rebuild pushed him away from the centre of the attack.

Tottenham Hotspur brought him home in 1989. He scored 67 goals in 105 league games there and won the 1991 FA Cup, a final in which Mark Crossley saved his penalty. At the 1990 World Cup his equaliser against West Germany in the semi-final became a line in a football anthem, “When Lineker scored”, sung in the chorus of Three Lions. His England career ended at Euro 92 with 80 caps and 48 goals, one short of Bobby Charlton’s record, after Graham Taylor substituted him against Sweden in what turned out to be his last international. Two injury-hit seasons with Nagoya Grampus Eight in Japan closed his playing days in 1994.

Television took him quickly. After a spell as a team captain on They Think It’s All Over, he succeeded Des Lynam in 1999 as the BBC’s lead football presenter, with Match of the Day at the centre of it. No one has hosted the programme for longer. When Leicester won the Premier League in 2016 he kept a public promise and opened the new season’s first show in his underwear. For eight years running he was the BBC’s best-paid presenter, a fee that a parliamentary committee chair and a former BBC presenter questioned in public.

The clean-cut image was always incomplete, and the institution that employed him found that out repeatedly. In March 2023 he called the government’s asylum policy cruel and compared its language to that of 1930s Germany. The BBC took him off Match of the Day for breaching its social-media guidelines; Alan Shearer, Ian Wright and a long list of colleagues refused to work in solidarity, and the programme went out with no presenter and no pundits. He was back within three days, and the BBC commissioned a review of its rules for freelancers. Critics said a licence-fee-funded sports presenter had no business campaigning; his defenders noted he was a freelancer. In May 2025 he shared a post about Zionism that carried an image of a rat, a long-standing antisemitic slur. He said he had not seen the image, that he would never consciously share anything antisemitic, and apologised. He had already announced he would leave Match of the Day; instead of staying on for the World Cup, he left the BBC altogether, presenting his final show on 25 May 2025.

The exit looked like a fall. It turned out to be a transfer. In 2014 Lineker had set up Goalhanger with the former ITV executive Tony Pastor, and its podcasts, The Rest Is History and The Rest Is Politics among them, became fixtures of the British podcast charts. The Rest Is Football, which he hosts with Shearer and Micah Richards, launched after the 2022 World Cup and now draws more than seven million streams a month. Goalhanger was named the UK’s fastest-growing company in 2026. Netflix signed the football show for a daily World Cup edition made in New York with no match footage at all, and it sat in the platform’s daily top ten for the whole run. In July the streamer renewed it for two years, with new episodes every Monday and Friday through to Euro 2028.

He has not narrowed himself to football either. Lineker fronts ITV’s celebrity game show The Box, and on 30 October 2026 he co-hosted Beat Luke Littler, Netflix’s live darts special from Manchester, alongside Richard Osman. Days earlier he had backed Harry Kane for the Ballon d’Or, which Kane won in London as the first Englishman since Michael Owen. The runner-up of 1986 knew what that vote can withhold.

He married Michelle Cockayne in 1986 and they have four sons; their eldest survived a rare leukaemia as a baby, treated at Great Ormond Street Hospital, and Lineker has worked for children’s cancer charities ever since. The couple divorced in 2006. His second marriage, to Danielle Bux, lasted from 2009 to 2016.

What happens next is the more interesting test. The Netflix deal keeps The Rest Is Football on screen until the European Championship of 2028, with Lineker as both host and proprietor. For the first time in his working life there is no referee and no editorial director above him, only an audience that can leave. The striker who never needed a warning now has to decide for himself where the line is.

Tags: sports, athletes, footballers, Alan Shearer, Gary Lineker, Leicester City, Micah Richards, The Rest Is Football