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The Media Today

‘Stick to Sports,’ UK-Style

A transatlantic debate about sports and objectivity cycles back round.
May 6, 2025 By Jon Allsop
Photo by Christoph Meyer/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images

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In 2023, Gary Lineker, a star soccer anchor on the BBC in the UK, went on social media and criticized the country’s then-Conservative government over a bill cracking down on asylum seekers arriving by boat as well as its messaging around the measure, calling it “an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” As I wrote in this newsletter at the time, his remarks triggered a media storm—not only in the right-wing press, which has long loved an excuse to bash the BBC for its supposed liberal bias (and Lineker as an avatar thereof), but at the BBC itself, which also gave the story top billing and, eventually, took Lineker off air pending discussions about his use of social media, a decision that itself triggered a crisis as soccer pundits and commentators took themselves off air in solidarity. (Match of the Day, the long-running soccer highlights show that Lineker hosts, ran in heavily truncated form and without commentary; GB News, an upstart right-wing network, counterprogrammed the show with an Alternative Match of the Day despite not having the rights to show any actual soccer, instead airing an amateurish carnival of woke-bashing that one critic likened to TV as made by nine-year-olds.) The next weekend, Lineker returned. “It’s good to get back to some sort of normality and be talking about football again,” one of his on-air colleagues said. “I echo those sentiments,” Lineker replied.

Fast-forward eighteen months or so, to last October, and Lineker’s employment status at the BBC was in the news again: the right-wing tabloid the Mail reported that he was on the way out, and that the next broadcast of Match of the Day would be his last. (When approached for comment by the paper, he told its reporter to “fuck off.”) The final-broadcast speculation turned out not to be accurate; as it came on air, Lineker quipped, with a trademark cheeky smile, that it was his “final show… before the international break” (a reference to a scheduled upcoming pause in the English domestic soccer season, during which the national team plays). But he really was on the way out. (Sort of, anyway.) A month or so later, the BBC confirmed that Lineker had extended his contract with the broadcaster through 2026, but that he would end his flagship Match of the Day gig, which he has held for more than twenty-five years, at the end of the current soccer season, which falls this month. (He will continue to front coverage of a major domestic soccer cup competition, as well as next summer’s World Cup, which will take place in the US, Mexico, and Canada.) The arrangement was described in positive terms by those involved. But the BBC reported at the time that Lineker stepping down from Match of the Day wasn’t his call, but his bosses’. 

Late last month, Lineker’s departure from the show returned to the headlines after he addressed it during a lengthy interview on—where else?—the BBC; asked by Amol Rajan, a high-profile journalist at the broadcaster, why he was quitting, he initially sighed and said, “It’s time,” but then suggested that higher-ups wanted him to leave. Lineker seemed to attribute this to a technical issue around the renewal of soccer-broadcasting rights, without getting into specifics. (The BBC declined to comment about Lineker, of the BBC, to Rajan, of the BBC.) 

But his claim, once again, made waves across the UK mediasphere. And the interview was notable for other reasons, too. Indeed, it was a fascinating coda to the Lineker controversy that I wrote about back in 2023, both in its BBC- and UK-centric specifics and in terms of the bigger questions that it raises about the relationship between journalism, sports, and politics, a relationship that appears to be in flux on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Rajan devoted a significant portion of the interview to the 2023 controversy itself, initially by asking if Lineker regretted making the remarks that triggered it; he replied that he didn’t, in the sense that his remarks were “accurate,” but that he wouldn’t do it again “because of all the nonsense that came with it,” and because he “didn’t like the damage that it did to the BBC.” Rajan pressed Lineker on whether the reaction really was “nonsense” and put to him the view of critics who might say—especially in light of his huge pay packet (he has long been the BBC’s highest-earning on-air talent)—that he should be politically impartial. Lineker insisted that he hadn’t broken the BBC’s impartiality rules, which, at the time, applied to journalists working in news and current affairs programming. (They were extended following the Lineker furor.) “The BBC tries to appease the people that hate the BBC,” he added. “They worry way too much about that rather than worrying about the people that love the BBC, which is the vast majority.” After Lineker pointed out the hypocrisy of supposed free-speech advocates who led the attack on his remarks, Rajan asked him whether trust in the BBC might matter more than his speech rights. “Why shouldn’t I have an opinion on things?” Lineker said. “I’m a bloody footballer who’s turned into a TV presenter.” Rajan then asked him whether he should moderate what he says about politics. “I do moderate what I say,” he insisted. “I’m very, very thoughtful about what I say.” 

Later, Rajan raised a separate episode, earlier this year, in which Lineker signed an open letter to the BBC criticizing its decision to remove a documentary about Gaza from its online streaming service, after it emerged that its thirteen-year-old narrator was the son of a deputy agriculture minister in Gaza’s Hamas government. (The BBC said that the producers of the program weren’t transparent about this fact, and acknowledged an editorial failure; the open letter countered that conflating “governance roles in Gaza with terrorism is both factually incorrect and dehumanising,” and that “if every documentary made in conflict zones were subjected to this level of politicised scrutiny regarding contributors, filmmaking in these areas would become virtually impossible.”) Lineker told Rajan that in his view, the BBC “capitulated to lobbying” over the program, and that he still wants to see it back online; when Rajan began to push back, arguing that depicting Gaza through the eyes of a child “almost immediately puts you on the side of Palestinians who are suffering,” Lineker interjected, “I know where I stand on this—I’m sorry, it’s more important than the BBC,” adding, with performed understatement, that “the mass murder of thousands of children is probably something we should have a little opinion on.” When Rajan said that the BBC needs to be impartial, Lineker interjected again: “Why?” he asked. “It needs to be factual.” “It needs to be impartial about a conflict, doesn’t it?” Rajan asked. “It wasn’t impartial about Ukraine and Russia,” Lineker countered. Rajan then noted the Israeli position of needing to put stories about Gaza in the “full context” of Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. “But that’s not the ‘full context,’ is it?” Lineker replied (after condemning the attack). “Because the full context starts way before October 7, doesn’t it?” Rajan put it to Lineker that he seems to see the BBC as a “complete mess on impartiality.” Lineker denied this, and acknowledged that such decisions are difficult. But “it’s that old thing, isn’t it?” he said. “If it’s raining outside, you don’t need someone’s opinion to say it’s not.”

I wrote after the 2023 controversy that some of the issues at stake were very specific to the BBC: the broadcaster is funded by a public “license fee” levied on TV-viewing households, a mechanism that has often been the subject of political contestation; it also has a mandate to be impartial and a particular way of executing on that obligation that can be hard for outside observers to parse. The interview again attested to all of this (not least in the way in which Rajan framed his questions, even if he was asking them as a devil’s-advocate-style interviewer, not a BBC spokesperson). As with the 2023 episode, however, the interview also raised questions of universal relevance to journalism—including, this time, debates around coverage of the war in Gaza and the problem of major news organizations neglecting loyal audiences to appease critics who will likely never be satisfied by their concessions, an issue not only at the BBC but in the US context, too (as I explored in the wake of last year’s election). And, as I also wrote in 2023, while the debate over the impartiality of the BBC may be specific in some respects, it has clear echoes of the reckoning over “objectivity” in US journalism that flared with particular force in the summer of 2020, and included questions as to what opinions journalists should and shouldn’t be free to express in their personal capacity on social media. That debate felt unresolved in 2023, and still does now.

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The initial Lineker controversy and recent interview also play into the version of this debate that pertains to sports journalists, in particular—a common matter of controversy often referenced in the US under the shorthand “stick to sports,” for the idea that sports broadcasters should steer well clear of politics. Even at the height of this debate in the US—which came, perhaps, in the early days of the first Trump administration, amid heated discussion about athletes taking the knee during the US anthem, racism, and Trump himself—the notion of sticking to sports felt both unreasonable, given the extent to which politics has always infused sports, and inconsistent: an ideological cudgel wielded, particularly, by pundits on the right to delegitimize views that they don’t like. Lineker gestured at the British version of this dynamic in his interview with Rajan, and his case has always been compelling evidence of it: he has, in the past, been widely lauded for fusing sporting and political commentary when doing so was deemed uncontroversial—perhaps most notably when he delivered a monologue during the 2022 World Cup excoriating the human rights record of the host nation, Qatar—only to be chastised in self-righteous terms for expressing views about immigration online (including by at least one right-wing commentator who has himself held down a gig at the BBC without seeing his politics as disqualifying). The reaction to Lineker’s recent interview was mild by comparison. But right-wing talking heads did once again attack him in decidedly stick-to-sporty terms, while liberals defended him on the opposite grounds.

If the stick to sports debate can feel cyclical, however, it does seem to have evolved in recent years—not least in the US, where the merger of sports and politics in media appears increasingly entrenched. In part, that’s surely because the right currently feels dominant politically (as Poynter’s Tom Jones and others pointed out in November, when numerous former stick-to-sports evangelists seemed to have no qualms with football players mimicking a Trump dance on the field). But it also seems related to the inexorable march of Trump-era politics as a totalizing cultural object, and how that culture is changing. It’s related to how the media is changing, too. Ahead of Trump’s reelection, and even more so in the wake of it, we heard a lot about the growing political influence of supposedly apolitical podcasts, including some focused principally on sports, that appeal in particular to young men. (Leading Democrats are certainly now courting their audiences.) On the right, Dave Portnoy, of Barstool Sports, is seemingly considered a bellwether of public support for the new administration; across the aisle, serious people appear to be taking seriously the idea that Stephen A. Smith, of ESPN fame, might be a viable presidential contender for 2028. (Smith himself has said that he has “no choice” but to consider a bid, and went on CNN’s lead Sunday show to discuss the prospect this past weekend.) 

The current political climate in Britain is very different (even if Keir Starmer, the achingly dull left-of-center prime minister, does make a virtue of his support for the leading soccer club Arsenal and once went on Football Cliches, an irreverent podcast). But podcasting is a growing cultural force in the UK as well. Lineker knows this better than most: he cofounded a studio that produces and distributes a wildly popular range of shows on various topics, some of them overtly political; he himself hosts a podcast about soccer that the BBC began licensing after concluding its new deal with Lineker last year (itself a rough echo of moves in the US for TV networks to get in on the creator economy). During their recent interview, Rajan asked Lineker why podcasts are so popular these days, and Lineker attributed their success, in part, to the fact that “you can listen to exactly what you want to listen to,” as opposed to traditional TV and radio, where news consumers have less control over what they consume. When Rajan asked Lineker what’s next for him, he said he would likely focus on the audiosphere rather than going back to TV. He also batted away a question as to whether he might one day go into politics. “I’m not interested in politics,” he said. “I’ve never had a view.” Before he finished saying that, he’d broken, once again, into that trademark grin.


Other notable stories:

  • Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts informed various cultural institutions that federal grants they expected to receive this year have been canceled or withdrawn, part of the Trump administration’s explicit move to realign government with his priorities and worldview, not least in the cultural space. The Post’s Sophia Nguyen and Herb Scribner report that literary magazines are among the organizations affected; according to a trade group, at least thirty-seven of the fifty-one publishers that received funding this year have taken a hit, including n+1, McSweeney’s, and the Paris Review. Yesterday, it emerged that a wave of senior officials have resigned from the NEA, which Trump has proposed abolishing entirely.
  • Over the weekend, on World Press Freedom Day, UNESCO, the United Nations cultural body, awarded a prestigious annual press-freedom prize to La Prensa, a newspaper in Nicaragua, praising it for courageous work in the face of vicious repression that forced it into exile. Soon afterward, the Nicaraguan government announced that it is quitting UNESCO, slamming the organization as “the promoter, and obviously as an accomplice” of an attack on the country’s values, and of rewarding “the traitors, slaves and lackeys of colonialism, and imperialism.” (Trump also appears to have UNESCO in his sights of late; the AP has more details.)
  • Earlier this year, we noted reports that Francesco Cancellato, an Italian journalist who had investigated the fascist ties of members of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s party, had been targeted by spyware made by Paragon, an Israeli company that at the time had a contract with the Italian government. (Paragon is reported to have canceled the contract.) Now The Guardian reports that Ciro Pellegrino, a colleague of Cancellato’s, has been notified that he, too, was targeted by spyware, though it isn’t yet clear when this happened or if the spyware made by Paragon was the tool used.
  • And Hanna Trudo, a former political journalist at The Hill and the Daily Beast, announced that she is considering running for Congress as a Democrat in New Hampshire, in a district whose incumbent representative is mounting a Senate bid. “I haven’t poll tested my pitch,” Trudo wrote in a memo. “I’m simply writing with the same fire I’ve spit for the past decade: Democrats must be better.” She added on social media that as a New Hampshire native, she takes the state’s motto, “Live Free or Die, seriously. Under Donald Trump, we are no longer free.”

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.