Match of the Day unrest on brink of new season

Match of the Day is facing major unrest from a group of pundits and staff on the eve of the new season.

Telegraph Sport has been told that staff in Salford – where the show is broadcast – have concerns about the vision Alex Kay-Jelski, the BBC's director of sport, has for the programme.

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Talk of rows and infighting has been denied but some at the corporation harbour fears for the future of Match of the Day. Insiders say there are those who have expressed a belief it is at risk of becoming a "second-class product".

Sister show Football Focus ended in May after 52 years on air amid plans for the BBC to cut up to one in 10 jobs within its 21,500 workforce over the next two years.

It is 62 years since the BBC first broadcast Match of the Day, its flagship football programme, but there has rarely been such a backdrop of uncertainty going into a season. There is a sense of restlessness and frustration over decisions made by Kay-Jelski.

Alan Shearer, the highest-profile figure on the show since the departure of Gary Lineker last year, has asked for his role to be significantly scaled back and it is likely he will be limited to one show per month. Last season, he made 32 appearances.

Micah Richards, meanwhile, is contractually obliged to appear eight times on Match of the Day – which still commands an audience of millions each week – along with a handful of live games in the FA Cup.

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Shearer and Richards work alongside Lineker on the latter's popular podcast, The Rest Is Football. After its success during the World Cup, when it was broadcast daily, it will be produced by Netflix for the new Premier League campaign.

The trio of Lineker, Shearer and Richards built a rapport on Match of the Day. One of the frustrations within Salford is that the constant revolving door of presenters and pundits is preventing the potential for camaraderie and continuity to be built in front of the cameras.

During the show's heyday, the axis of Des Lynam, Jimmy Hill, Alan Hansen, Trevor Brooking, Mark Lawrenson and, later, Lineker provided familiarity, but things could not be more different now. The uncertainty has been heightened by the fact so many contractual issues need to be resolved.

Dion Dublin, Martin Keown, Nedum Onuoha, Theo Walcott, Shay Given and Stephen Warnock – all of whom were regular contributors to the show, whether on a Saturday or a Sunday – were not included in the list of pundits when the BBC announced who will feature this season.

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Some contracts are expected to be finalised shortly and there is an expectation that the six pundits will remain on Match of the Day and other programmes.

Thomas Frank, Ashley Young, Robbie Keane and Toby Alderweireld, the former Tottenham Hotspur defender, have been recruited to work with Mark Chapman, Kelly Cates and Gabby Logan. The trio share hosting duties, following Lineker's exit.

Kay-Jelski is committed to driving up social media and digital figures and the highlights of games that are shown on Match of the Day are exactly the same as those that are published online on Saturday evening – the programme is set apart by its analysis.

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Indeed, some sources have said Kay-Jelski is "too obsessed" with social and digital content at the expense of the broadcast product.

Telegraph Sport revealed in October that match-of-the-day-viewers-plummtet-gary-lineker-bbc-exit/">Match of the Day had shed hundreds of thousands of viewers on BBC One since Lineker left as football fans flooded to the broadcaster's new online highlights.

It can now be revealed that the average weekly peak rating last season fell by eight per cent from 5.9 million to 5.4 million, amid a similar decline across all scheduled television.

However, the average weekly views for the new 8pm Premier League highlight clips across iPlayer, the BBC Sport website and app were 1.65 million.

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The number of digital accounts accessing Match of the Day content in an average game week soared by 32 per cent from 1.17 million to 1.55 million. That includes viewing of the Saturday and Sunday programmes on iPlayer, the 8pm highlights on iPlayer, and highlight clips on the BBC Sport website and app.

Total digital requests also grew 55 per cent from 78 million to 121 million. Across BBC Sport socials, Match of the Day content was viewed more than 350 million times last season.

One source at the corporation said this proved the programme and its brand were "thriving" under Kay-Jelski.

A BBC insider said: "Match of the Day's overall reach has increased as we expand access and engagement across platforms, delivering content to audiences where they want it, when they want it. And millions of viewers continue to tune in each week for the flagship show's expert analysis and insight from our outstanding line-up of presenters and pundits."

The BBC was approached for comment.

How Alex Kay-Jelski ruffled feathers at the BBC

April 11, 2024: Kay-Jelski is announced as the BBC's new director of sport in a move that shocks staff at the corporation. Kay-Jelski, who succeeds Barbara Slater, is confirmed to start that summer, making him one of the youngest and least-experienced senior executives in sports broadcasting.

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His appointment caps a meteoric rise for the 40-year-old who was editor-in-chief of The Athletic, as well as sports editor of the Daily Mail – the first gay man in this role – and The Times in his early thirties.

June 11, 2024: JK Rowling, the Harry Potter author, criticises Kay-Jelski about a column he wrote in 2019 in which he appeared to compare women concerned about the fairness of biological men participating in female categories to racists. Kay-Jelski, then sports editor of The Times, claimed athletes who spoke out on trans sport, such as Martina Navratilova and Sharron Davies, BBC pundits, were "not experts". Kay-Jelski later said he had been "calling for kindness in the debate" but would "not be advocating for any position in my role at the BBC".

November 11, 2024: The BBC confirms Gary Lineker is to quit Match of the Day at the end of the season. He is also expected to leave the corporation after the World Cup. The 63-year-old signs a reduced-rate 18-month extension with the broadcaster that includes FA Cup coverage.

Kay-Jelski later appoints Mark Chapman, Gabby Logan and Kelly Cates as successors to Lineker on a rotating basis. Lineker's impending exit comes barely a year after he plunged Match of the Day into its worst-ever crisis over a social-media post comparing the Government's language around its flagship immigration policy to that of Nazi Germany.

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March 13, 2025: Kay-Jelski tells staff the BBC plans an overhaul of its sports department, which will include offering most staff voluntary redundancy and scrapping 27 jobs. He also announces BBC News programme Sportsday could end, along with a number of presenting roles, and that the frequency of sports bulletins on the channel will also be reduced.

The shake-up is expected to mean the BBC will focus more on its football coverage. One of the proposed new roles is a "Football Correspondent (Tactics)", who will be tasked with "delivering tactical insights to football fans".

May 19, 2025: Lineker leaves the BBC after sharing a video on social media featuring an anti-Semitic rat emoji. He apologises and says he had not seen the offending trope before reposting it. But his recklessness is compounded by an interview he gives to the Telegraph in which he calls Israel's response to the October 7, 2023, terrorist attacks "beyond depraved" and "completely out of proportion". He then accuses those who stayed silent about it of being "almost complicit". He also appears to criticise Kay-Jelski, for having "no television experience".

October 1, 2025: The BBC loses the television rights for the Boat Race to Channel 4 after Kay-Jelski is accused of showing "very little enthusiasm" during negotiations. The corporation first showed the Oxford vs Cambridge event in 1938, but there is a perception from some figures involved in talks that Kay-Jelski views the event as "elitist".

BBC sources say this is not true, telling Telegraph Sport that a failure to renew rights was based purely on concerns around return on investment. Less than three months later, the BBC surrenders the rights to the Commonwealth Games for the first time since 1954, after being outbid by TNT Sports.

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November 10, 2025: Kay-Jelski is warned of "very low" staff morale amid suggestions his controversial reforms are breaching employment law. Complaints are made after he sends an internal memo saying those unhappy with change, and their options, could seek voluntary redundancy.

The BBC is heavily unionised and there is a feeling behind the scenes that such a warning could amount to constructive dismissal. "We are worried that morale is at a very low point in all areas of BBC Sport because of the prevailing culture," says a message, which is believed to have been sent to Kay-Jelski by the National Union of Journalists.

November 29, 2025: It emerges that the BBC is planning what is later described as a "work-from-home" World Cup. When Salford is confirmed as the location of its tournament nerve centre, Lineker taunts the corporation, calling its studio a "green box in Salford" while boasting about his sacking freeing him up to spend the tournament in New York.

Kay-Jelski responds on the eve of the World Cup after unveiling the state-of-the-art headquarters, which is quickly upstaged by ITV's impressive rooftop studio in Brooklyn.

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February 25, 2026: Kay-Jelski says the BBC does not need live rights to a sport to be relevant. During a panel discussion at the Financial Times Business of Football conference, he also declares the corporation is no longer competing with ITV, Sky and other television networks but was instead in a wider battle for the attention of smartphone users.

His comments come almost a year after the BBC lost what remained of the corporation's coverage of the England men's football, rugby and cricket teams' fixtures outside the "Crown Jewels" events that must remain free-to-air by law.

April 23, 2026: The BBC ends Football Focus after 52 years. The demise of the corporation's best-known football show after Match of the Day comes amid plans for it to cut up to one in 10 jobs within its 21,500 workforce in the next two years.

July 21, 2026: Having been outshone by ITV at the World Cup, the BBC has the last laugh after finally sending its star television presenters and pundits to the United States in time for the semi-finals and final.

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The corporation boosts its share of the audience for a major international football final in the first tournament since Lineker's exit. More than 80 per cent of the 19.6 million people who watch the showpiece tune into its coverage instead ITV's.

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