Ted Lasso: The Latest Fun-Loving False Prophet of American Comedy
Being nice is not a legitimate comprehensive moral system
I’ve had coaches that felt like prophets. My first wrestling coach was vulgar, and borderline abusive, and I would have followed him to war. I spent middle school cutting weight unnecessarily, vomiting in the practice room and refusing to see a trainer after a bloody nose or cut face or tweaked joint. I watched him lead the high school team to several state finals seasons, and I tried my best to mimic the brawling-yet-slick style he instilled in the older kids, “fist-fighting in a phone booth,” and looked for his stamp of approval. Once more into the breach, dear friends.
I had coaches who were nothing like prophets. My varsity football coach led our team to a winless season my freshman year. I started a few games, and wrestled in the off-season. When I came back lighter and in better shape, I wanted to play linebacker rather than offensive-line. He gave me a set of conditions, which I met. He then told me that I would retain my spot in the lineup at left guard. We went winless again.
I have had coaches I thought were nothing like prophets, and turned out to hold real moral character. A coach who once compared offensive line to “being naked at an orgy. Just jump in there and get some,” later experienced a conversion of sorts, quit coaching and became a pastor, a prophetic vision of my own redemption. And coaches where the inverse turned out to be true. Those who disappeared midseason or created a system of favoritism and lowered expectations.
In school sports, especially in small towns over the US, coaches are more than men and women who teach us how to throw balls or make us run sprints. They are often our teachers, our role models, our guidance counselors and encouragers. They tell us what life could be like if we stayed the course of discipline and excellence that is required of competitive athletics, the essence of modern day prophets.
So when Ted Lasso became popular, I jumped on the train despite the fact that I hate soccer. It combines two of my least favorite things into one activity where scoring happens less per game than incidents of athletes writhing on the ground in false pain to draw a call. Those two things being running, and fragility-as-commodity. I played for one year, and was politely asked not to return for the next season due to the unmitigated aggression and lack of anything resembling knowledge of the rules or basic technique.
Still, the genius of Ted Lasso is that despite the ultra-European depictions of soccer fandom and the blending of team and community dynamics, an American viewer who knows anything of small-time sports, knows this coach. If you haven’t seen the show, Lasso is a football coach from the Midwest who becomes the head soccer coach of a floundering team in England. His demeanor, his commitment to the whole person in front of him over the game itself, his positivity. He reminds me of a goofier Tony Dungy, and American coach known for his unflagging commitment to encouragement.
Like my own coaching prophets, he cares about the player as a person, about the people they will become as a result of the discipline.
Lasso seems incapable of two things; he cannot allow those in his immediate vicinity to go unencouraged and unencumbered by his relentless positivity and service, and he cannot bring himself to contribute much other than his attitude to the success of the team. He crafts no plays, nor does he engage in strategy other than that which his assistant, Coach Beard, brings to his attention.
Nothing phases Lasso. His positivity and kindness keeps him through a divorce, a mental health crisis, a failing team, conflict with his boss, and the betrayal of a close friend.
The show is well-written, and the viewer gets the message early. Kindness cures all, and the game is less important than the overall well-being of the players and coaches. We can experience rebirth in simple kindness and civility, and the true win is in believing in yourself.
I have had coaches who prayed, in very literal terms, that God would grant us victory, training our hands for war like King David, and to give us a belief that triumphs over all. I have had coaches care more about my grades than my athletic performance, and more about keeping my word to my team than whether I was the best player for the job. I have seen incredible acts of kindness. Bills paid, rides given, jobs secured. So at first glance, Lasso, with his name indicative of hard work accompanied by incredible simplicity, seems like a lot of coaches I have had, and it drew me into the show.
But something is off. The show is fun and tight and I watch, but I can’t shake the feeling that someone is trying to dupe me.
Perhaps it’s the moment in season 1 when you discover that Ted has left his wife and child behind after realizing their marriage is in deep trouble, in his words, to give her space. This subsequently leads to a divorce, which he avoids by medicating his dismay by over-drinking in several episodes. Maybe it’s his poor treatment of the team psychologist, who shows up after Ted experiences several panic attacks, a strange regression of Ted’s character into a typical hyper-masculine therapy-averted crank. Maybe it’s his references to God as a woman meant to demonstrate his progressive spirituality, or his refusal to grapple with his father’s suicide, or his rampant dishonesty and aloofness.
By the show’s design, Ted is the good guy. He develops his players and friends alike through a particular strategy of kindness and personal attention, and for this we are supposed to laud his moral system as the height of excellence.
But Lasso is not like the prophets I held dear.
To begin with, there is the obvious flaw in the show’s subliminal reasoning: a man who acts the way Ted acts is not a good man. The man who leaves his wife, and much worse, his son, thousands of miles away because his wife asked for space, cannot be described as the height of morality. He does not get divorced until long after he leaves them, and he does not simply move a couple of hours away for a better job. He moves across an ocean to another continent, and resigns himself to seeing his son only a few times a year. It is one thing to give “space” space to a spouse in order to save a marriage, another to give space to a child who needs two parents. A coach who seeks to develop his players at the expense of his own family does not have his priorities in order. A man who avoids his anxiety and past experiences in order to coach a soccer team may well be a typical man, but typical men by definition are not exemplars of courage and tenacity. The simple fact is that despite an obvious intent to make Ted Lasso a hero through surface-level moral virtue, kindness and attention, he does not have the deep moral fortitude indicative of real heroes. Commitment. Courage.
Perhaps the more insidious part is that his shallow morality acts in conjunction with the fact that he is not at all interested in winning or even coaching, makes use of the prophetic image of the American coach, with none of the payoff of the prophetic message. In the Old Testament, the prophets are eccentrics, preachers primarily concerned with the moral good. But they did not spend all their time preaching. They fought when necessary, and they called out kings for their indiscretions. They did all this to take back ground from spiritual and literal enemies alike.
Ted Lasso bears the image of those coaches I mentioned before, and yet, he does not spend any time fighting. The shallowness of his morality bleeds into his message and renders him and the show’s larger worldview powerless. When he counsels one of his players, Jamie, on dealing with his abusive and manipulative father, it seems strange knowing Ted’s kid is far away, dealing with growing up without his dad’s influence. When he counsels Roy on relationships, we know Ted abandoned his marriage. When Ted tries to convince Rebecca of the glory of her new found independence, we have the image of him drinking away his own loneliness.
Besides all this, Coach Lasso is a coach that does not coach. He admittedly knows nothing about soccer, and he, along with the writers of the show, seem to value basic kindness over competence. This is a child’s way of viewing the world. He is there to build a winning team, not to bake biscuits or to sing karaoke. Yet this is the worldview espoused by the powers that make television shows like Ted Lasso. If the morality of the show is shallow, it is not only due to the hypocrisy of the main character, but also the priority system it sets up. The shallow value of being nice usurps personal responsibility, excellence, sacrifice. This is a false message, a lie about both the way the world works and the way it should work. Niceness does not equal morality, nor does being a nice person does not mean being competent at the job one is asked to do. The prophets, some of the most moral men in history, were not always nice. They had to fight, often, for the good they preached. But they won ground back by the strength of their character.
Why do the show runners and writers and producers espouse this morality? It is part and parcel of the morality of the political Left, and of the various geographical centers of elitism. To embrace the kind of person Ted Lasso was based on, the coaches I would have died for, is to embrace a set of principles that do not align with what they want to promote, what they need to promote to consolidate influence.
The prophetic coach has a morality that extends deep into his or her personal life, an example rather than a talking head. Depicting him would mean advocating for commitment and duty over personal fulfillment. The false prophet is one who seeks fulfillment over duty, who advocates individual actualization over sacrificial love. The false prophet is the one the ruling class in the arts must depict, for fear of giving credence to the political right.
The prophetic coach demands excellence, the false prophet covers for mistake. The prophetic coach believes in personal responsibility, where the false prophet believes in the collective experience as a means of validation. The prophetic coach takes skill and strategy seriously, as it is a means of victory, whereas the false prophet believes victory is secondary to identity, that the parts are more than the whole.
False prophets always have shades of the true prophetic figure, without any of the nuance or power that accompanies the message. The reason Balaam is so insidious is that his message sounds so much like the prophets of Israel.
There is a scene in the show where Lasso meets up with Beard at the pub, and Lasso breaks the news that he has decided not to bench his aging captain in order to preserve his dignity. His reasoning is the essence of false prophethood, an appeal to a moral standard that appears above reproach, and yet falls flat in the face of scrutiny. He tells Coach Beard, “You know better than anyone that all this ain’t about winning…That ain’t how we measure success, right?”
Beard, Lasso’s dearest friend, calls him to carpet and explodes in anger.
“Damn it, it is!” He yells in the crowded bar. “These are professionals. And winning does matter to them. And it matters to me. And that’s ok! How do you not get it? If we lose we get relegated. If we get relegated, this is over, and we will have built nothing. And if you want to pick a player’s feelings over a coach’s duty, to make a point… I don’t want to drink with someone that selfish.”
The show is understanding of the outburst, but ultimately comes down on the side of Lasso, the side of the losing, selfish coach. Selfishness in the name of kindness is not morality, it is the false prophecy of the cultural degeneracy.
Ted Lasso is a fun show. But this is in spite of the way they bastardize the coach he could have been, the good ones I have known. Those coaches cared about winning, about real moral character beyond the niceness of a sign above a doorway. They cared about my commitments, to my team, my family, my work and my school. Ted Lasso may be a fun character, but false prophets often are.
The world doesn’t need more shallow messengers bearing the banner of kindness, more t-shirts proclaiming “be kind.” The world needs prophets and warriors, those who are more concerned with “building something” than with false niceties.
Ted Lasso is a good show, but don’t let the message fool you. The road is wide that leads to destruction, and all road signs put in place by the culture fail to mention the dead end, the soundless train that always seems to run across the tracks.
Loved this analysis. While we enjoy Ted lasso it does feel like the further the seasons go along it’s just speaking so loudly of the post modern worldview of the current culture (independence is great, marriage is good if it makes you happy, etc). This current third season just seems to be a continued pattern of that and not as good as the previous seasons.
If I could give 1000 likes or more, I would. You need scale, Harmon. You are a thoughtful and very good writer. I enjoyed this article very much.
I watched 2 seasons of Ted Lasso at a friend’s suggestion. While I understand the need to counter-balance the patriarchy, which has gone awry, this extreme pendulum swing is sad, selfish and dangerous. It is designed to elevate self (not sovereignty), break down the winning paradigm of team sports (anti-competition) and imply that anyone not willing to comply with be-kind hive mind is an ignorant jerk that needs to be shown...or shunned.
There is so much going on here. The values in a system that creates a New England Patriots team, for example (something I have witnessed with a closer view than most) can be dissected and viewed with worthwhile critiques as well as admiration. Yes, many things need to change/evolve in our culture. We are not devoid of modern-day prophets; that just don’t get any air time.
I was lucky to witness a coach who had it all. Kindness and grit, and the genuine desire to pull the best out of each individual. Season after season- 5 in a row and a few more- he took the so-called losers (the ones left after all the “in” coaches had their pick) to the town championship in little league. It was extraordinary and poignant every time watching these kids best the so-called best. Winning was important, but it wasn’t everything. The kids were coached to be their own best, as well as for the team, and they simply aimed for the bar that was set by their coach and the sport in which they participated. The lessons were invaluable, and that coach had the satisfaction of watching many graduate high school and college with those values still intact.
Thank you for your articles. I always look forward to reading them. And, I hope very much they get the wider audience they so deserve.