Did Reshmin Chowdhury Get Match of the Day? The Answer
Did Reshmin Chowdhury Get the Match of the Day Job? Here's What Actually Happened
Did Reshmin Chowdhury Get the Match of the Day Job?
No. Reshmin Chowdhury was reported as a contender to replace Gary Lineker in late 2024, but the BBC gave the role to a three-person rotation — Mark Chapman, Kelly Cates and Gabby Logan — for the 2025/26 season. Chowdhury remains a lead presenter for TNT Sports and talkSPORT.
For a few months in late 2024, Chowdhury’s name was everywhere in the Lineker-succession conversation. It’s worth revisiting why she was taken seriously for the job, and what it says about the BBC’s decision that she still wasn’t the one who got it.
The contender story, briefly
Lineker confirmed in November 2024 that he’d leave Match of the Day at the end of the 2024/25 season, having presented it since 1999. Reports named a long list of possible successors — Mark Chapman, Kelly Somers, Alex Scott, Gabby Logan among them — and outlets including the Daily Mail, GB News and FourFourTwo added Chowdhury to that list, noting she’d previously been courted for a BBC football role by the corporation’s director of sport, Alex Kay-Jelski, and that she’d filled in on MOTD2 before. FourFourTwo’s own assessment at the time was blunt: she “wasn’t the name we were imagining” for the role, and she wasn’t considered the frontrunner — that was Chapman.
What the BBC actually did
The succession played out differently than a straight one-for-one swap. The BBC opted for a shared presenting team rather than a single successor: Chapman, Cates and Logan split duties across the Saturday show, Match of the Day 2 and a new Wednesday Champions League highlights slot for the 2025/26 season — the first time the flagship role has been shared rather than held by one person since the programme began in 1964. Chowdhury, despite her BBC history and MOTD2 credits, was passed over.
She’s since spoken publicly about the process. In comments reported this year, she described BBC colleagues testing her football knowledge in ways she believed male presenters wouldn’t face — recalling being quizzed on a specific Real Madrid player by two colleagues and concluding “they wouldn’t do that to another guy.” That builds on remarks she gave The Sun in August 2024, before the decision was made: “Being British Asian, I think I had to convince a lot of people that I knew about football… The barriers to entry were everywhere.”
Why she was in the conversation at all
Chowdhury’s case for the job rested on a genuinely unusual résumé. She has a BSc in Politics with Economics from the University of Bath (2000) and an NCTJ Post-Graduate Diploma in Newspaper Journalism from Harlow College (2003) — a formal journalism qualification that’s rarer among broadcast presenters who come up through punditry or reality TV routes. She speaks English, Bengali, Spanish and French.
That language ability is what got her into elite football coverage in the first place. From September 2008 she spent two seasons presenting for Real Madrid TV, where she became the first journalist to interview Cristiano Ronaldo after his then-world-record move from Manchester United, and separately secured an exclusive with Karim Benzema, conducted in French. She’s described the Ronaldo interview herself, in an interview with BROOD Magazine, as one of the standout days of her career — recalling colleagues telling her at the time they’d remember it forever.
She joined BBC Sport in May 2010, presenting on the BBC News Channel and BBC World before moving into football coverage — including stand-in stints on MOTD2 and The Women’s Football Show. Since 2014 she’s built a parallel career on TNT Sports (rebranded from BT Sport on 18 July 2023) and talkSPORT’s GameDay Exclusive, alongside hosting Champions League and FIFA World Cup draws, and fronting World Cup coverage for beIN Sports and Olympic coverage for Discovery+/Eurosport.
What the outcome says about the BBC’s football coverage
The more interesting story here isn’t whether Chowdhury got the job — it’s what the BBC chose instead. Splitting the role three ways across Chapman, Cates and Logan is a departure from nearly 60 years of MOTD having a single face, and it means the corporation sidestepped a straightforward “who replaces the star presenter” narrative altogether. Chowdhury’s case — an established, multilingual broadcaster with a genuine journalism qualification and two decades of major-tournament experience — was strong enough to get serious media attention, but not strong enough to beat three well-established BBC names with longer in-house track records at the corporation specifically. Her comments since suggest she sees that outcome as connected to how her knowledge was scrutinised differently within the BBC, not just to who else was available.
Confirmed vs. unverified
Confirmed: her education, NCTJ diploma, Real Madrid TV role and Ronaldo/Benzema exclusives, BBC Sport tenure since 2010, TNT Sports/talkSPORT roles, the BT Sport→TNT rebrand date (18 July 2023), and the final MOTD presenting line-up for 2025/26.
Unverified or unconfirmed: her personal net worth (no reliable public figures exist — treat any number cited online as speculation), and any account of internal BBC deliberations beyond what she and reporters have said publicly.
Sources
- FourFourTwo, “Surprise Gary Lineker replacement mooted as BBC prepare to find new Match of the Day host” (Nov 2024)
- GB News, “Gary Lineker replacement twist with BBC chief considering surprise candidate” (Nov 2024)
- William Hill News, “Match Of The Day Hosts: Past & Present” (2026)
- Wikipedia, “Reshmin Chowdhury”
- BROOD Magazine, “Interview with Reshmin Chowdhury”
- Broadcast / BroadbandTVNews / Wikipedia, “TNT Sports (United Kingdom)” — BT Sport rebrand, 18 July 2023
