Gary Lineker has claimed that the BBC wanted him to leave Match of the Day in a wide-ranging interview where he vowed he "did not regret" comparing the Tories' asylum policy to Nazi Germany.
In a sit-down with the broadcaster's Amol Rajan, Lineker said he "had the sense" he was being shown the door.
"Well, perhaps they wanted me to leave," the ex-Spurs striker said. "There was the sense of that."
"I always wanted one more contract, and I was umm-ing and ahh-ing about whether to do three years [more]," Lineker added.
"In the end, I think there was a feeling that, because it was a new rights period, it was a chance to change the programme."
The former Leicester City forward was also probed on his reaction to then-Home Secretary Suella Braverman's 2023 pledge to ban illegal migrants from ever claiming asylum.
He had said at the time that it was "immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the thirties".
But Braverman then accused Lineker's words of "diminishing the unspeakable tragedy" of the Holocaust.
Now, the footballer-turned-podcaster has vowed he does "not regret" his words.
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"I don't regret saying them publicly, because I was right - what I said, it was accurate - so not at all in that sense," he said.
"Would I, in hindsight, do it again? No I wouldn't, because of all the nonsense that came with it... It was a ridiculous overreaction that was just a reply to someone that was being very rude. And I wasn't particularly rude back."
He continued: "But I wouldn't do it again because of all the kerfuffle that followed, and I love the BBC, and I didn't like the damage that it did to the BBC... But do I regret it and do I think it was the wrong thing to do? No."
Lineker also accused the broadcaster of "capitulating to lobbying" after it pulled a Gaza "documentary" which turned out to star the son of a Hamas terror group official as its narrator.
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"Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone", was pulled from BBC iPlayer in February after it emerged its 13-year-old narrator's father was Hamas's deputy agriculture minister Ayman Alyazouri.
Lineker has now said he would "100 per cent" support the documentary being made available again, and argued: "I think you let people make their own minds up. We're adults. We're allowed to see things like that. It's incredibly moving."
He added that, although the 13-year-old was narrating the programme, the script had "not been written by [the child], it's been written by the people who produced the show".
"I think [the BBC] just capitulated to lobbying that they get a lot," Lineker blasted.
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