Love it or loathe it, seen it or saved it, we need to talk about Ted Lasso. The award-winning show kicks off a third – and likely final – season having captivated TV audiences in both the UK and US, even if you could fill two internets with what Ted doesn’t know about football...
Words Si Hawkins Additional reporting Stuart Higgins
There’s an episode near the end of Ted Lasso’s second season – no big spoilers; it’s an odd standalone one – where Coach Beard, Ted’s assistant at fictional club AFC Richmond, goes on a mighty post-defeat bender, gatecrashes a private club, gets chased by a jealous lover, fights one of his players’ parents and throws shapes to electro-house banger Hello by Martin Solveig (featuring Dragonette) while hallucinating about Thierry Henry. Top fun, although you can’t imagine that happening to Ray Lewington or Pat Rice.
Lasso is not an entirely faithful portrayal of life in the upper echelons of English football, then – but it’s working, gosh-darn it. This unlikely sitcom about a US college football coach (played by Jason Sudeikis) managing an English soccer team has just begun its eagerly-awaited third season and it already boasts a Manchester City-sized trophy cabinet. The first series broke records for Emmy Award nominations, and the lure of Lasso has only grown. There’s shortbread cookie-flavoured Lasso ice cream (a moreish treat he bakes for his boss in one episode), a moustachioed Ted Build-a-Bear, and even a whole AFC Richmond club shop.
Actually, City pop up regularly in the show – they loan Richmond a player, though he’s a git – and plenty of real football figures make cameo appearances. For season three, producers signed a six-figure deal with the Premier League, to use footage, kits, logos... maybe the trophy. Ted Lasso gets real? Well, previous seasons have rubbed football connoisseurs up the wrong way, which isn’t something Friends ever had to cope with.
English football is globally massive, yet it’s bizarre that a show about a bang-average London club would become America’s most talked-about sitcom. Strong characters are the secret, and there are interesting stories behind the scenes, too. Cristo Fernandez was a promising young footballer in Mexico before finding belated fame as loveable Richmond striker Dani Rojas – not that he courts it.
“It happened at a shopping mall in Los Angeles,” says Fernandez, on a break from filming in London. “I was in the loo when I could feel this person just staring at me as I was taking a wee. It was very unnerving.
“Eventually he said, ‘Are you that smiley one from Ted Lasso?’ He didn’t even k
