Gary Lineker thought his apology would be enough to save his BBC job after he shared an anti-Semitic insult online, he has admitted.

Instead, the former Match of the Day presenter agreed he was forced out of the corporation in a case of “quit or be quitted”.

In his first interview since his exit from the BBC, Lineker said he did not leave of his own volition. He had hoped to stay on to front coverage of the 2026 World Cup and next season’s FA Cup after standing down from Match of the Day.

He caused offence in May be sharing a pro-Palestinian video on Instagram which featured a rat emoji, considered to be an anti-Semitic slur against Jewish people.

Lineker swiftly made his regrets: “I made a mistake and I immediately took it down and apologised, which I thought should have been enough,” he told The New World, formerly known as The New European.

‘I’m not anti-any group of people’

Asked if it was “a case of quit or be quitted”, Lineker replied: “The latter.” He lost out on an estimated £800,000 in BBC pay as a result.

Lineker said he believed that he had complied with the BBC’s impartiality rules in his social media posts about Gaza and strongly denied being anti-Semitic.

“People talked about me being anti-Semitic. I’m not anti-any group of people. Any race, any colour. But I am anti-the killing of children,” he said.

“I’ve got no skin in the game. I’m not Muslim, I’m not Palestinian, I’m not Israeli, I’m not Jewish. I come from a place of complete impartiality. And then it becomes about truth.”

He said of seeing the images coming out of Gaza: “It’s beyond awful. Look, I’m pretty resilient. But I can sit and scroll through on my phone and feel absolutely hopeless and I’ll cry.

‘Gaza is an open-air prison’

“Most days I shed a tear when I’ve seen something horrific happening to someone.

“Gaza is an open-air prison and I’ve been speaking about that for ages. It goes way back for me. Way before October 7 – which was awful – having seen the way the Palestinians are treated as second-class citizens.”

Asked if he considered Israel’s actions in Gaza to be genocide, Lineker said: “It’s hard to see it any other way, really. The polls suggest significant numbers of people are finding this difficult to justify…

“I’m not an expert but I think most genocide experts believe it to be the case, yes.

“There’s a lot of evidence that suggests that. But it doesn’t matter what I think.”