Mark Lawrenson has reflected frustratedly on his exit from the BBC and hit out at the broadcaster for how they handled his departure after 30 years of service as a pundit and co-commentator.
The Beeb have faced criticism this week after it was announced Gary Lineker would leave his role as the presenter of Match of the Day. He will continue to host the show until the end of the current Premier League season.
Lineker has signed a new 18-month contract to lead the BBC’s FA Cup and 2026 World Cup coverage. But the corporation’s culture and media editor Katie Razzall has claimed the former England striker was not offered a new deal to remain on Match of the Day.
And Lawrenson says his own exit from the BBC in 2022 still rankles with him. He was a long-time analyst alongside Alan Hansen and Lineker on Match of the Day and spent 25 years on Football Focus until the end of the 2021-22 season.
But the player-turned-pundit says his release from the corporation’s flagship programme MOTD came while out for lunch with “the head honcho in terms of football”. He said: “We sat down and hadn’t ordered or anything and he said, ‘Oh you know, we’re going to change it – you’re just going to do Football Focus.'”
And in a new interview this week, he told the Telegraph: “I remember when Al [Hansen] left the BBC. I said, ‘Bloody ‘ell, Al, they’ll want me gone now!’ In hindsight, the timing would have been better for me to go with Al.
“They could have said to me then it was the right moment. But the BBC are funny. They are reluctant to say ‘thank you, but no thanks’. I knew I was going to be off. They just wanted new faces, which is fine. Just say that after 20 or so years.”
The former Liverpool captain claims he was informed Football Focus would going “on the road for a year” and that BBC bosses told him: ‘You probably won’t want to do it.’ His one-year rolling contract was not renewed.
Asked if he still watches Football Focus now, the 67-year-old added: “No. The honest answer is I do my 15,000 steps around York on a Saturday before the football starts. But I don’t particularly watch it. Football Focus was always a magazine-style programme and there are so many others out there now.”
Lawrenson still remembers fondly his time on set with Lineker and Hansen but says the rules changed before his departure. “I would always go in and tell a few jokes before going on air,” he said.
“There were never restraints on Match of the Day. I can’t recall anyone ever saying anything which had a response of, ‘Oh my God’. Obviously that changed before the end.
“There was a clear moment when I was working on Saturday morning and you could tell people were thinking, ‘Hmm, we’re not sure if you can say that anymore.'”
Lawrenson has long been vocal about his criticism of the BBC, claiming they are too ‘woke’. He said earlier this year on The Ben Heath Podcast: “Gone woke? It’s top of the woke league. They’re frightened to death, absolutely, totally frightened to death.
“You’ve seen the stuff with Gary Lineker. I think day by day the integrity of the corporation gets chipped off. It used to be absolutely fantastic, but they are woke plus 100 per cent.
“They say to everyone ‘you can’t say this, you can’t do that’… it’s somebody’s opinion, and the thing with Gary Lineker was he works for himself so he’s entitled to his own opinion, and rightly or wrongly he’s got an opinion about everything.
“You used to go on the programme and you had to get your headset in your ears and they’d be talking to you from the gallery, and somebody would ask a question and you’d want to jump in and they’d go ‘No, don’t say anything’. That got to me a bit in the end.”
