Gary Lineker has said he received threats after he retweeted then deleted a post by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel that called for Israel to be banned from international sporting events, including football.
A source has said he misread the post as a statement saying that the ban had been enacted. Of the ensuing furore, the Match of the Day presenter said he had received threats. “But it’s not about me. I am not the victim here,” he said in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian.
The former England star, whose tweets in the past have nearly cost him his BBC job, added he was in “recovery of sorts” from X (formerly Twitter) and had cut his screen time.
He also said he believed that some elements of the press were “weirdly, oddly obsessed with trying to do me”. “Trying to like, put me away. They take everything out of context. Deliberately. It’s almost like a game for them to try to destroy me in some way. It’s very odd.”
Lineker was briefly suspended from the BBC after likening the then home secretary, Suella Braverman’s rhetoric on immigration to 1930s Germany, in possible breach of BBC social media guidelines. He said he was deliberately precise with this tweet. “I worded it very carefully, I always do. Anything that is slightly borderline political, I put a lot of thought into.”
He described social media postings on the Hamas-Israel war as “so toxic”.
“Everybody I talk to, every single person I know, is going: ‘What? What is happening?’ But the minute you open your mouth – well, not my mouth, but the minute I tweet a little bit – it’s so toxic.
“If you lean to one side or the other, the levels of attack are extraordinary. How could it be controversial to want peace? I just don’t understand it. You don’t need to be Islamophobic to condemn Hamas, or antisemitic to condemn Israel. But at the moment it’s just awful. Awful,” he said. When talking about the numbers of children killed, he said: “I feel sick.”
Of criticism of his stance on the war, Lineker said: “But I don’t see it as a Jewish thing. I see it as the Israeli government. Obviously, they’re responding to 7 October, but crikey, one atrocity does not deserve 80 atrocities. Or more.”
Of X, the presenter said he had whittled his screen time right down. “Before, if I was killing time … I’d just be trawling through social media, getting irritated and depressed by world news.” Those hours scrolling have been replaced by reading – “a lot” – and listening to podcasts by his Goalhanger Podcasts production company.
The podcast business, he said, had saved him from becoming embroiled in the internecine world of social media.
Lineker also said he signed up to the Refugees at Home charity and opted to provide an “emergency foster service”. He said that two men had stayed with him: one from Turkey and another from Balochistan, around the same ages as Gary’s eldest and youngest sons.
