Gary Lineker has not been on speaking terms with a fellow sports presenter for more than 10 years because of a row over a 'stolen job' in the corporation's sports department.
Lineker left Match of the Day at the end of the 2024-25 season after presenting BBC Sport's flagship Premier League highlights programme for 26 years.
He also stepped down from anchoring live World Cup and European Championship match coverage amid the controversy over a social media post that marred his last days with the United Kingdom's public broadcaster.
Steve Rider, whose face was welcomed into living rooms all over the country as the presenter of Saturday afternoon BBC sports behemoth Grandstand and with both ITV Sport and BSkyB during his 45-year career, retired this week. He won't have been expecting to hear from the former England striker with his well wishes.
In an interview with The Telegraph, the television legend revealed a rift between himself and Lineker that dates back to Lineker's attitude towards the 'pompous' Royal & Ancient Golf Club and Rider's subsequent suggestion that Lineker was the wrong man to have succeeded him as the top golf presenter when he left the BBC.
Rider, 75, also told reporter Oliver Brown that Lineker's involvement in the discourse of politics made his demise inevitable at the steadfastly politically neutral BBC.
"To put forward his opinions so energetically, you need to step outside the framework of the BBC," said the iconic voice of Grandstand.
"That message was never convincingly conveyed to him by the BBC, and that’s where they are at fault. He needed people looking after him before he pressed the button on some fairly volatile retweets. He needed to be saved from himself. So, there was a kind of inevitability about it."
Rider was a multi-sport monolith in the eighties and nineties, fronting Grandstand and coverage a number of specific sports on BBC and ITV.
He was a regular anchor covering the Olympics as well as football, rowing, motorsport, rugby and golf.
"For four years, the R&A and most other observers knew that Gary was the wrong man for the job," he said of Lineker.
"Golf presentation, especially at Augusta, is seat of the pants, unpredictable and demanding."
Lineker, 64, has departed the BBC but quickly signed up with DAZN to cover the upstart broadcaster's highlights show at the Club World Cup.
Topics: Football, Gary Lineker
