da pinnacle： Gary Lineker has almost 7m followers on Twitter. It’s an army. Everything he says is a point of interest – positive or negative. Evert opinion about football is instantly viral, every political comment, every dad joke. Nothing is a secret.
da 888casino： That’s not much of a surprise. After all, this is the man who is pretty much the face of football in England. The presenter of Match of the Day and indeed the Champions League. Most football that appears on free-to-air TV – on the BBC or the rare European game offered free of charge by BT Sport – is presented by one of the most recognisable faces in Britain.
If he hadn’t played for Barcelona, Everton and Tottenham Hotspur, and if he hadn’t won a World Cup golden boot for England, at this point, it wouldn’t matter to his celebrity: he’s no longer famous for football, he’s famous for being Gary Lineker.
And yet, he did play football: he was one of the great strikers of his generation. Indeed, he is one who holds a very special status in Premier League history.
Lineker’s final game in England was at Old Trafford in May 1992: Manchester United beat Tottenham Hotspur 3-1, and finished second in the old Division One table, behind Leeds United. The next season, the Premier League would begin, and United would start their run of dominance which saw them win 13 league titles. When Lineker netted his last goal in English football, not only was the Premier League only a game away, but Old Trafford’s Stretford End was later demolished and rebuilt, and the ground is a very different arena today.
By the time the former Spurs and England striker came back from a stint in Japan, the Premier League had already changed the game.
Whereas before, televised football wasn’t a major draw, now it was a massive event people would pay top money for. Sky Sports changed the face of the live broadcast, but Lineker joined Match of the Day as a pundit, working his way through the decades to becoming the face of the programme as its presenter, not its invited guest.
Perhaps it’s only fitting that the man who scored last goal against Manchester United before the Premier League began – arguably the club who benefitted the most from the change in format – was also the man who helped usher in the new age of celebrity and glamour in televised English football, whose league went from something of a backwater in the late 80s and early 90s because of hooligan troubles and the ban on English clubs playing in European competition, to having the most lucrative and most popular league in the world.
But the corporate face of the league, its lust for foreign expansion and imperialism, its creep into areas of the world where football has yet to penetrate almost to colonise new areas of the world and create new Premier League fans who will watch matches on TV rather than attend games in stadiums, is not something that gets stuck to Lineker, however. For all his interesting links, direct and indirect, to the behemoth that is the English top flight in its current format, Lineker is also the purest face it can have.
The presenter of the only free-to-air UK screening of the league each Saturday night, he is the link that the game seems to keep with its past, before the money became the ultimate driver, and before worldwide commercial dominance was even considered a possible aim. For all that he could symbolise – like a Richard Keys or an Andy Gray – about the Premier League’s heritage, its corporate nature and possibly even its greed, he doesn’t.
Perhaps that has nothing to do with the fact that Lineker’s career in the UK ended on the day that old English football died. Maybe it has nothing to do, either, with the fact that there’s something just that little bit more pure about watching Premier League highlights on Match of the Day than even watching it live on another channel.
But maybe Lineker’s fame and as a result, his army of Twitter followers are latching on to the vestiges of a purer national sport, and one that isn’t about to be sold out to TV viewers around the world just because more people means more cash. And that, in many ways, is a comforting thought.
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