WATCH | Booted from BBC: What’s the Gary Lineker controversy all about?

The BBC suspended sports broadcaster Gary Lineker from his Match of the Day presenting duties, following a tweet it deemed to be in breach of its guidelines.

The BBC’s removal of Lineker from the show – a national institution in the UK that has been airing since the 1960s – marks an extraordinary development and was followed by an outpouring of public support for Lineker and a slew of his colleagues announcing they would not appear on the show without him.

In a Twitter post on Tuesday to his 8.7 million followers, Lineker – one of England’s greatest football players and now among the UK’s most influential media figures – said the language used by members of the UK government towards asylum seekers was similar to that used in Nazi Germany.

Lineker, 62, wrote: "There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries.

"This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the '30s."

"The BBC has decided that he will step back from presenting Match of the Day," the BBC said late on Friday, "until we’ve got an agreed and clear position on his use of social media".

READ | British PM Sunak hopes for solution as Lineker removal sparks BBC sport chaos