Gary Lineker off flagship BBC soccer show after Twitter posts
Former England captain Gary Lineker was temporarily removed on Friday from his role as presenter of the BBC’s flagship soccer highlights show in the wake of his criticism of the British government’s new asylum policy.
The long-running “Match of the Day” program, which has been a national institution in Britain since the 1960s, will be aired on Saturday “without studio presentation or punditry,” the BBC said in an extraordinary development after a slew of Lineker’s colleagues announced they wouldn’t appear on the show without him.
In a post on Tuesday on his Twitter account that has 8.7 million followers, Lineker — one of England’s greatest soccer players and now among the U.K.’s most influential media figures — compared lawmakers’ language about migrants to that used in Nazi Germany.
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