The measure of the quality of the products is if they withstand the passage of time and continue to be a reference apart from their protagonists and the changing circumstances of a town’s life. Match of the day is the BBC program that summarizes the football day every Saturday since 1964. It is an institution like cricket, the House of Commons, the Wimbledon tournament, the Royal Shakespeare Company or Agatha’s Mousetrap Christie.
Gary Lineker, ex-Barcelona and English national team player, in which he scored 48 goals, directed the program since 1999 with a contract that allocated him more than one and a half million euros a year. His opinions on football are universally respected for his equanimity and his own judgment. He is a celebrity who transcends sport by creating currents of opinion favorable or against the current Government.
It is accepted as an unquestionable truth that the BBC is the most respectable audiovisual medium, because it does not depend on the Government or advertising. It is funded by the license issued by all Britons who own a television set at home. But relations with governments are usually strained, because the temptation to intervene in the channel’s programming is irrepressible and has occurred at all times since its foundation in 1922.
The BBC prides itself on impartiality, but its stars can have their own judgment without stepping on any red lines. In the case of Gary Lineker, he also channels it through his Twitter account, which has more than 8.8 million followers.
His sacking as Match of the Day presenter was not for favoring a team or player, but for harshly criticizing the asylum seeker policy of the Rishi Sunak Government and its radical Home Affairs Minister Interior Suella Braverman, who introduced legislation to detain the tens of thousands of asylum seekers crossing the English Channel by boat or shepherd and immediately deport them to Rwanda in central Africa in a deplorable operation.
Lineker responded with two strong tweets. The first was laconic: “My God, this is horrible.” A follower questioned him and immediately replied saying that “it is an immensely cruel policy, which harms the most vulnerable, in a language that is not different from that used in Germany in the 1930s”.
The more nationalist press and several Conservative MPs considered that he was comparing the Government to the Nazis and asked with all the media trumpeting at their disposal to remove him from the BBC. Lineker remained silent and did not delete the tweets. After two days, the corporation decided that he had broken the rules of impartiality and removed him from the program.
In a few hours, a national debate opened on freedom of expression and on the right of journalists to speak freely in the alternative media available to them. The BBC itself was leading the news with the Lineker case and the paradox was that many of the institution’s sports commentators did not want to take part in last Saturday’s Match of the Day, a program that became a skeleton of videos without commentary . A shame and contempt for the audience.
The press and other media joined the cause and lashed out against this type of censorship so bad. On Monday, the BBC announced that Gary Lineker would return to host the show next Saturday. Match point of a footballer turned sports commentator, who has defeated the powerful BBC for a humanitarian cause so despised by the populisms that advance and enter or preside over governments of some liberal democracies with authoritarian touches.
It is not just a sports or journalistic debate. It is symptomatic of the unscrupulous attack on what remains of freedom and ethics in Western democratic societies, in which the siren songs of autocracies reach institutions that, like the BBC, were and I trust will continue to be the guarantee of a certain impartiality.
The underlying issue is the barriers that Europe erects to prevent the arrival of thousands of immigrants fleeing war, persecution, hunger and poverty. The Mediterranean cannot continue to be the cemetery of so many misfits and the sea of ??shame of our supremacist comforts and selfishness.
