Match of the Day has pitfalls to beware in hunt for Gary Lineker replacement

When done well, the presenter role is made to look as if anybody could do it; when done badly, it can be a deeply aggravating turn-off. That makes the job hard enough in the first place even without considering that, at least in my lifetime, Match of the Day has always had a highly competent presenter at the helm.

People hate change at the best of times, but this 60-year institution is particularly demanding. The audience is football fans and we’re never happy about anything; the opportunity for a big  cathartic whinge-up about something that is ultimately so trivial is half the appeal.

The programme also holds a special place in the TV football firmament that is unreplicated anywhere else. The show’s evolution has been gradual, rather than revolutionary, with Gary Lineker holding it together with steady but cheeky hands for the past 25 years, bar the brief spell when the highlights went off to ITV in the early 2000s.

There’s any number of ways that appointing Lineker’s successor could go wrong. The last thing anyone wants is for it to lean too far towards the light-hearted and become a second edition of Match of the Day 2, or ‘Match of the Day 2 2’.

The Sunday highlights programme works because they know that the bulk of the invested audience is already well aware of the results of every game and may well have watched the games from that day live already. Dipping half a toe into Soccer AM-adjacent waters helps the show offer something slightly different, particularly after a full day of po-faced Sky Sports studio hand-wringing and outrage.

That doesn’t quite wash on a Saturday night. The constraints of the format mean that every minute has to count, and every second wasted on tedious studio banter is another second your team is not getting their due analysis.

The two jobs call for different skill sets that have to be delicately balanced. Adrian Chiles was very well-regarded when he made the move from MOTD2 to fronting ITV’s coverage, but his happy-go-lucky style quickly proved irritating to many viewers when he was given more time to spread out and a remit to take things more seriously. The presenter is just one part of the production, but the tone is set by them.

Conversely, nor do you want Match of the Day to go back to the days of being Very Serious People In Formal Wear Talking Very Seriously, nor the somewhat shoutier, engagement bait-y approach ITV seem to prefer from Mark Pougatch during summer tournaments. Social media, Sky Sports and countless podcasts do that job already, and most of them have proven to be too tiresome to be worth listening to.

Match of the Day has quietly become excellent at the actual football side of things over the past decade or so, with several pundits – most notably Alan Shearer – becoming exceptionally good at their jobs. But they’ll still take a moment here or there to make a Monkees pun about Carlos Baleba, or to tease one another in a way that conveys genuine affection rather than hyper-macho knee-grabbing bantz.

My wife has only a very passing interest in football, but she enjoys Match of the Day because of the relationships that have formed over many years. There is something genuinely delightful about the leaked video of Lineker calling Shearer a c*** during a pre-match transmission test that comes across throughout the Match of the Day broadcasts.

That is Lineker’s special charm, and it has permeated Match of the Day for two-and-a-half decades: friendly and accessible without straying too much into being patronising, yet authoritative enough to still have something to keep the more knowledgeable football nerds tuning in despite now being able to watch every goal hours before the programme goes to air.

Like him or not, Lineker will be a tougher act to follow than many give him credit for. The job isn’t as easy as it looks.