Football 1 The BBC 0: Pundits and punters line up in support of Gary Lineker

If Gary Lineker’s critics thought that forcing him off Match of the Day would be a significant win in the culture wars that beset the UK, they were perhaps last night reflecting that it had turned into the ultimate Pyrrhic victory.

The huge outpouring of support for Lineker among fellow pundits and the football community was well beyond what might have been expected and rendered the BBC unable to maintain even a modicum of its usual football output in an unprecedented mass withdrawal of labour.

Saturday’s football schedule on BBC TV and radio was an emasculated travesty of what the nation’s broadcaster usually transmits, forcing the BBC to apologise to its viewers and listeners as its most-cherished shows and institutions were forced off air or broadcast to a standard well below that expected

Match of the Day, the nation’s most-loved and longest-running sports programme, was reduced to a 20-minute farce of goals highlights, there being neither presenters nor pundits worth their salt willing to participate after BBC director general Tim Davie had suspended Lineker on Friday, because of his tweet comparing the Government’s language around their new Migration Bill to that of 1930s Germany. Match of the Day 2 today will likely be forced into a similar format on Sunday.

What started out as a clipping of Lineker’s wings by Davie, a former Conservative party candidate, and by the recently appointed BBC chairman Richard Sharp — the man who made a ‘significant error of judgement’ in failing to declare his role in securing Boris Johnson a loan just weeks before then-Prime Minister Johnson nominated him for the job — has turned into a full- scale crisis which would be beyond the wildest imaginings of the satirical show, W1A. 

BBC Sport shows were forced off air or broadcast to standards well below what is expected

BBC Director General Tim Daive suspended Lineker following his controversial tweet

Davie’s show of strength in cutting Lineker down to size has only served to demonstrate just how powerful support is for him within football. It started with Ian Wright and Alan Shearer saying they wouldn’t appear on Match of the Day and ended up with Jurgen Klopp jumping to Lineker’s defence and Leicester fans brandishing ‘Migrants welcome!’ placards in support of the presenter and former England striker, who was at the King Power Stadium to watch his hometown team lose 3-1 to Chelsea.

Pundits Micah Richards, Jermaine Jenas, Jermain Defoe, Glenn Murray, Dion Dublin and presenters Alex Scott, Mark Chapman and Jason Mohammad were among the scores of BBC Sport mainstays who withdrew their services on Saturday, meaning flagship programmes Football Focus and Final Score didn’t go ahead. BBC Five Live were forced to cancel Fighting Talk and the Five Live Sports Show at 1pm and ran podcasts instead.

Match of the Day commentators led by Steve Wilson, Jonathan Pearce, Guy Mowbray and Robyn Cowan declined to work. Last night’s Match of the Day had to cobble together commentary over goal clips and as such was only 20 minutes long, unprecedented in the modern era.

Ian Dennis, who unlike the other commentators is on the BBC staff rather than a freelance, did commentate for 5 Live on the Leeds v Brighton game, introducing the game by saying it was ‘a very difficult time for BBC Sport and those that work in the department. And we all hope that gets resolved.’

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp jumped to the defence of Lineker following the incident

A Manchester City side showed a sign which read ‘Gary Lineker for Prime Minister’

Premier League players have also made it clear, via their union, the Professional Footballers’ Association, that they will not participate in Match of the Day post-match interviews while Lineker is suspended.

Liverpool manager Klopp expressed bemusement at the situation when asked after Liverpool’s 1-0 defeat to Bournemouth. ‘My problem with the situation how I understand it — and I’m not native — is that I cannot see any reason why they would ask anyone to step back for saying that. I can’t. I’m not sure if that’s a language issue or not. But that’s the world we are living in. Everybody is so concerned about saying the right stuff to every-body, and if you don’t do that you create a s*** storm which we didn’t have when we were young.

‘If I understand it right then this is about an opinion about human rights. That should be possible to say. If I’ve got it right then for me there’s no reason [for the BBC to have stood Lineker down].’

Fellow pundits are perplexed that Lineker has been suspended when the likes of Lord Sugar, who presents BBC show The Apprentice, has tweeted attacking rail union leader Mick Lynch and strike action, apparently with impunity, while saying that Lineker ‘should keep well away from taking sides on party political issues or political controversies’.

Not all the pundits agree with Lineker’s views. However, they all think he should be allowed to express them and disagree with the way in which the situation has been handled. They have spoken together on the phone but say that the boycott was in no way orchestrated by Lineker but rather spontaneously led by individuals. It seems as though the stance of Wright and Shearer led to a snowball effect.

There is confusion as BBC guidelines on social media commentary make it clear that the risk of breaching the standards are lower ‘where an individual is expressing views publicly in an unrelated area, for example a sports presenter… expressing views on politics’.

That would appear to give Lineker licence to tweet. Pundits say they were encouraged by the BBC to tweet about human rights and LGBT issues at the Qatar World Cup.

Alan Shearer and Ian Wright showed solidarity with Lineker by not appearing on MOTD

Former head of BBC News Roger Mosey said the BBC has been inconsistent in applying its impartiality rules

Greg Dyke, the BBC director general between 2000 and 2004 and a former FA chairman, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the understanding at the corporation is that ‘news and current affairs employees are expected to be impartial and not the rest. If you start applying the rules of news and current affairs to everybody who works for the BBC, where does it end?’

He added: ‘The real problem is that the BBC has undermined its own credibility by doing this because it looks like the BBC has bowed to Government pressure. The perception out there is going to be that Gary Lineker, a much-loved television presenter, was taken off air after Government pressure on a particular issue.’

Roger Mosey, former head of BBC News, said on Twitter: ‘[Lineker’s] tweets weren’t compliant with editorial guidelines . . . The BBC is right about that, and also that impartiality is vital. But . . . the BBC has been inconsistent in applying the guidelines over the years. The corporation also hasn’t explained why Lineker is restrained but Alan Sugar & Co seem not to be. By removing Lineker from MOTD, it looks as if the BBC has given in to one side of the culture war.’

It seems unlikely Lineker will back down, delete or apologise for tweets. Davie has taken his stance and unless he is about to reinterpret the guidelines to give sport and entertainment stars more leeway, he doesn’t have much wriggle room. And all the while a great British institution is left strafed from all sides, collateral damage in the nation’s culture war.