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CHAPTER 1
The Birth of Ted
"Everybody who saw it liked it and laughed at it."
The foundational joke of Ted Lasso, the engine of its fish-out-of-water central premise, is that a man who knows nothing about soccer is hired to coach a team that competes at the pinnacle of the sport: England's Premier League.
In the series, the explanation for this patently absurd turn of events is that Rebecca Welton, played by Hannah Waddingham, wants to get revenge upon her vile ex-husband, Rupert Mannion (Anthony Head), by destroying his favorite thing: his beloved Premier League club, AFC Richmond, which she acquired in their divorce.
It is a concept borrowed from the 1989 baseball comedy Major League, in which the viperous widow of the owner of the Cleveland Indians fills the team with losers in order to tank it, so she can move the franchise via an escape clause tied to attendance. (Scheming fictional sports owners take note: the secret self-sabotage ploy never seems to work.)
But the original reason Ted was sent to England was to (1) make Americans feel OK about not knowing anything about soccer, and (2) amuse them into considering watching it anyway. The character was born in 2013 in an ad for NBC Sports, which had just purchased the American broadcast rights to the Premier League. The network's promotional campaign initially primarily targeted America's relatively small but fervent core audience of dedicated soccer fans. But unlike the previous rights holder, Fox Sports, NBC planned to broadcast every game for free-the tagline was "Every match. Every week. Every team."-and needed to expand the audience in order to make its purchase worthwhile.
And unlike the rest of the world, American sports fans would take some convincing to watch soccer. "We weren't just selling NBC Sports; we were selling soccer," said Bill Bergofin, who was the head of marketing for NBC Sports at the time and one of the architects of the Ted Lasso spots.
They decided the best way to do that was to create a comic link between America's favorite sport and the one that captivated fans nearly everywhere else, two abiding obsessions that happened to share one name: football.
John Miller, then chief marketing officer for NBC Sports: The Premier League had been on Fox for a while, and they didn't show all that many games. We were going to show every game, because we had multiple channels in which to do it, and we were going to show them for free. So for a soccer fan to be able to see every Premier League game free-it didn't stay free for long, but at that point it was-was a big selling point.
But 50 percent of all regular soccer viewers were in just five markets. So we can get them, but it became "OK, well how do we grow it beyond those five markets?" Because we knew that if we get the people who are regular fans of the Premier League and who have been watching it on Fox Sports, it's just not going to be as big as we need to make it, considering the rights that we just paid for.
Bill Bergofin, then the newish head of marketing for NBC Sports: I was still sort of proving myself within NBC, so I tried to convince John to bring someone in from the outside. I had been working with Guy Barnett for probably five years at that point, and he had become a dear friend. He's one of the greats, in terms of advertising creativity, and being a Brit who had spent the greater part of his adult life in the US, he was uniquely qualified. And he had always said to me, "If you ever get the Premier League, you have to bring me in."
So one day I brought Guy in and said, "Look, I think we really need someone who authentically has lived this life and is a diehard fan, but also understands American culture equally." And we started having a conversation and halfway through the conversation, John pointed to a campaign for New Era. Someone he knew had said it was one of the best-performing campaigns, based on research, that he had done.
The campaign for the sports cap company featured celebrity fans trading insults about rival teams. Alec Baldwin, a New York Yankees fan, squared off with John Krasinski, a Boston Red Sox diehard. The dueling Chicagoans Nick Offerman and Craig Robinson bickered about the Cubs and White Sox. "Your infield has more holes than a Swiss cheese doughnut," Offerman offered. Robinson: "The last Cub to throw a no-hitter was your pitching machine."
Bill Bergofin: John asked if Guy knew it. And Guy said, "Well, of course: I wrote it."
John Miller: We said, "Well, is there something that we can do that would help explain the game but make a lot of noise? A long-form comedy video?"
Bill Bergofin: We know who we are and who the core fan is. But how do we create that tipping point for soccer in America? And a lot of it was you had to educate people, and we needed to do it in a way that took the piss out of it so that it wasn't intimidating.
Guy Barnett, founder of the Brooklyn Brothers ad agency: We wanted to explain the game in an entertaining manner. Not in a superficial or supercilious manner as it had been done by lots of people, but really from an American perspective: What is this game about?
John Miller: We thought, Let's take the most popular sport in America, which is football, and see if we can make some comparisons to football. Or at least have the idea of somebody with a different American focus look at the game and see if we can help explain it, but do it in a fun way.
Bill Bergofin: So we started thinking, What would be the right way to do it? Who's the right fish out of water? And are they here? An American in England? An English coach in America? You know, which is the right way to go?
John Miller: We originally went after John Oliver, who was then at The Daily Show, and he was sort of intrigued. It would have taken a different tack: a Brit helps explain the game in a fun way. But at that time, Jon Stewart was going to direct a film and so all of a sudden, John Oliver is going to take over The Daily Show all summer long. So he was out. Then we went to Chris Pratt, because we thought that he would be sort of interesting and fun. And he's a guy from Parks and Recreation, an NBC connection. So we asked him but he was in the middle of Jurassic Park and Guardians of the Galaxy and going off on a film career, and wasn't interested.
We briefly toyed with Ricky Gervais and thought, Maybe that's not the best idea. We also talked with Seth Meyers, because he was a real Premier League fan, but he was not quite as big as we wanted then.
Bill Bergofin: So we're all kind of scratching our heads. We had a talent wrangler and they said, "You know, Jason Sudeikis, I'm not sure he's a soccer fan, but he's coming off SNL and I don't believe he has any projects lined up."
Sudeikis wasn't the world's biggest soccer fan, but sports had been central to both his life and his career. Growing up in the Kansas City suburb of Overland Park, Kansas, he was a point guard on his high school basketball team and went on to play briefly in community college. He eventually gave up that dream and pursued another: comedy.
A move to Chicago in the late 1990s put him in the orbit of the famed Second City comedy theater, where Sudeikis's famous uncle, George Wendt (best known as "Norm!" in Cheers), got his start in the 1970s. Sudeikis eventually joined the theater, performing improv with future stars and Saturday Night Live colleagues like Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, and Horatio Sanz. He went on to perform improv at Boom Chicago, an American-style comedy theater in Amsterdam. There he worked with Joe Kelly and Brendan Hunt, the future Coach Beard himself, who became close friends, comedy partners, and eventually cocreators of Ted Lasso.
They all had met previously doing comedy in Chicago: Hunt was an Illinois native and theater major who decided early on to dedicate himself to Chicago improv, studying at Second City before heading to Europe to become a Boom Chicago legend. Kelly grew up in Georgia and also did improv in Chicago before moving to Amsterdam. He would later work with Sudeikis as a writer at Saturday Night Live. Kelly also created the Comedy Central series Detroiters with Zach Kanin and the stars: Sam Richardson, who would later win an Emmy as the nutjob oligarch Edwin Akufo in Ted Lasso; and Tim Robinson, who would later win an Emmy for I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, the most acclaimed sketch comedy series of the past decade.
But Amsterdam is where Sudeikis, Hunt, and Kelly all bonded, fortuitously so. In fact, Sudeikis and Hunt's sessions playing the video game FIFA before and after their Boom Chicago shows was partly what sparked both men's interest in professional soccer (Hunt's passionately so).
Sudeikis's big break came in 2003, when he was hired as a writer on Saturday Night Live. It would be two more years before he was promoted to the main cast. He credits a parody he cowrote of "The Super Bowl Shuffle," the legendary cringe rap performed by the 1985 Chicago Bears, as the key to his promotion: while rehearsing the bit with the host, Tom Brady, and others, Sudeikis, in the background, did a version of the goofy Running Man dance he would perform later in Ted Lasso, inspiring hysterics on set.
"I had been doing that dancing since I was on basketball teams in the early nineties," he said on the Fly on the Wall podcast in 2023. "It was the same thing that made my fifteen-year-old friends laugh." Two weeks later, he was added to the cast.
Over ten years on SNL, Sudeikis was a reliable utility player who could also carry sketches as the star. His most notable roles included then-vice president Joe Biden; Mitt Romney; a cop who ran an ill-advised "scared straight" program; and a self-involved douchebag who paired with Kristen Wiig in the aptly named recurring sketch "Two A-Holes." He also stood out as a tracksuited, tight-Afroed dancer in the exuberantly absurd "What's Up with That?" extravaganzas, in which his signature move was yet another version of the Running Man.
But it was a 2011 riff on collegiate sports sex-abuse scandals that formed an unlikely blueprint for historical TV acclaim. In a sketch titled "Coach Bert," cowritten by Kelly, Sudeikis played a college basketball coach-sans mustache but with a recognizably strident yet obtuse diction-giving a press conference in which he throws his harmless but off-putting assistant coach, played by Steve Buscemi, under the bus for "having all the tell-tale signs of a sexual predator."
"He's antisocial, lives with his mom, he's never had a girlfriend," Sudeikis continues. "I mean, he's a genius with the X's and O's but an absolute zero when it comes to human interaction."
Sudeikis formally announced he was leaving Saturday Night Live in a July 2013 appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman, not long after shooting the first Ted Lasso ad. "You have a giant mustache," Letterman marveled, little suspecting that years later those whiskers would become an international symbol of kindness and decency.
John Miller: Somebody suggested Jason Sudeikis, because he had done a character on SNL as a coach.
Guy Barnett: Wouldn't it be funny, I thought, if this American coach was put in charge of an English football team? Not as a pedophile, obviously, but as a fish-out-of-water character. Through his ignorance we could shine a light on the sport our client NBC had just paid $250 million to air. And thus, the idea for Ted Lasso was born.
Bill Bergofin: It came back that Jason was very interested but he wanted to see a few other directions and ideas, and Guy put those together. We were kind of sweating a little bit time-wise, and then Jason came back and agreed to do it.
Jason Sudeikis, creator, Ted Lasso, seasons 1-3: When we were first doing the commercial, because it has this international flavor, I was immediately like, "Oh, Joe and Brendan." There were no other two people that I was going to pick at that point in my life. It was because we had the opportunity to work in a place called Boom Chicago in Amsterdam, it was started by three Americans from Northwestern University in the middle of Amsterdam, and it took off.
Brendan Hunt, creator, Coach Beard, seasons 1-3: I got a call from Jason: "Hey, NBC Sports wants me to do a soccer thing." He and I both became soccer fans, to different degrees, at around the same time living in Amsterdam. Neither one of us was into soccer as kids in the Midwest, but we moved to Europe and caught the bug.
So he called me and said, "This is a soccer thing, and if we do it, we get to go to England for three whole days. Then they've got to fly us out to go see a Premier League game later when the season starts." This is the best gig ever! It will never get better than three days in London and one soccer game!
Jason Sudeikis: It truly was us wanting to get to be flown out to go see a Premier League game, specifically an Arsenal game because Brendan's the biggest fan out of me, Brendan, and Joe. And we hit that bull's-eye!
Brendan Hunt: This ad agency came to Jason and said, "Hey, here's, like, three different ideas of, like, you know, kind of like a coach thing." And Jason's like, "Uh-huh. This one where he coaches a Premier League team, but he doesn't know anything about it-I'm gonna push that around a little bit. And I'm bringing in my buddy Joe Kelly and my buddy Brendan. And they were like, "Oh OK. Oh, great."
Jason Sudeikis: Originally, the ad agency, Brooklyn Brothers, had envisioned the character as more of a hair-dryer-type coach: somebody who yells and screams, like a Bobby Knight or your stereotypical NFL coach. I wanted to do a softer version of that-just yelling and screaming didn't feel as fun and also felt derivative of things that I'd played. And it shifted into less of a hair dryer and more like this bumpkin guy. I dressed like Mike Ditka-you know, the polyester shorts, the orange glasses, and the mustache, which I had. He chewed gum.
