It started as an advert
Ted Lasso began in 2013 as a series of comedy adverts made to promote American television coverage of the English Premier League. The actor Jason Sudeikis played a cheerful American football coach who is hired to manage an English soccer team despite knowing nothing about the game. The adverts were popular, and in 2020 Sudeikis turned the character into a full series on Apple's streaming service, with TED LASSO taking over the fictional London club RICHMOND, nicknamed the GREYHOUNDS.
The show won the Emmy for best comedy two years running, in 2021 and 2022, and after three series a fourth was announced in 2025. It has plenty of strong language, so it is best for older fans, but its kindness and optimism made it a comfort for many people watching during the pandemic.
Believe
Ted's first act at Richmond is to stick a hand-drawn sign reading BELIEVE above the door of the dressing room, and his optimism, bad puns and refusal to give up slowly win over a team that expected to hate him. Every morning he brings the club's owner, REBECCA, a small box of homemade shortbread BISCUITS, and the daily delivery becomes a quiet ritual of friendship between them, even before she admits she hired him hoping he would fail.
His best-known advice to a player who has made a mistake is to be a goldfish, which he calls the happiest animal on earth because it has a ten-second memory. Scientists would disagree, as our pets page explains, but the point about letting go stuck.
Brett Goldstein was first hired as a writer on the show and then asked to play ROY KENT, the fierce, swearing veteran captain, by sending a tape of himself; he won the part and two Emmys for it. COACH BEARD, Ted's quiet assistant, is played by Brendan Hunt, who created the series with Sudeikis, Joe Kelly and Bill Lawrence, the maker of the hospital comedy Scrubs.
A real game and a real place
Richmond is a real area of south-west London, on the River Thames, and many scenes were filmed around its green, where the team's local pub is played by a real pub, the Prince's Head. The match scenes were shot at real football grounds. At the end of the first series Richmond are relegated from the Premier League, and the second is spent fighting their way back up. In 2023 the club was added as a playable team to the most popular football video game, so fans could manage the Greyhounds themselves. Our soccer page covers the real game Ted has to learn.
The rest of the club
JAMIE TARTT is the team's talented but big-headed striker, KEELEY a bubbly model who goes on to run her own business, NATE the shy kit man whose clever tactics turn him into a coach the newspapers call a WONDERKID, HIGGINS the club's kindly director of operations, TRENT Crossley a sharp-tongued journalist, and DANI Rojas a joyful Mexican player whose catchphrase is FOOTBALL is life. The DIAMOND Dogs are the coaches' informal club for talking through each other's problems, and the dressing-room BANTER between everyone, much of it too rude to repeat here, is what fans quote most.