TaxProf Blog: NY Times Op-Ed: Why America Desperately Needed Ted Lasso

Following up on last month’s post, Ted Lasso, Holy Fool:

New York Times Op-Ed: Why America Desperately Needed Ted Lasso, by Margaret Renkl:

“Ted Lasso” never claimed to be a healing salve for national fury. It is simply the story of a heartbroken but optimistic American football coach who accepts a job as manager of a British football team in the hands of a heartbroken and pessimistic owner who has just won it in a bitter divorce. Rebecca Welton knows almost nothing about running a sports franchise, and her imported coach knows almost nothing about the game that Brits call football. Rebecca is Miss Havisham in Manolo Blahniks. Ted is Forrest Gump in the Premier League.

But there is something about Ted Lasso’s sunny optimism and faith in silliness as a social lubricant, something about his openness and his unshakable kindness, that lifted Americans’ pandemic-worn hearts. “You know what the happiest animal in the world is?” Ted asks a glum player just bested in a team scrimmage. “A goldfish. It’s got a 10-second memory.”

Maybe we trusted him because his cornpone wisdom turned out to be more than an empty cliché. Early in the first season, Ted repeatedly finds himself the butt of jokes and the target of stadium chants — “Wanker! Wanker! Wanker!” — but he is an adoring father whose only child is an ocean away, a family man whose wife no longer loves him. Ridicule can’t touch Ted Lasso. His sorrow is already complete.

He may think of himself as a goldfish, in other words, but he is also a broken human being who has not yet lost faith in the promise of wholeness.

The team Ted inherits is a fractious group of lonely rivals and low-grade bullies from around the globe — the U.N. in a locker room. The players learn to love and trust Ted, but they also learn from him how to recognize and acknowledge each other’s humanity, how to love and trust one another. From there it’s only a small, inevitable step to playing as a real team. …

Little wonder, then, that we fell in love with a television series in which bad behavior is almost always motivated by some hidden, healable pain; one in which selfishness and vindictiveness rarely reflect the full sum of someone’s character, and forgiveness liberates forgiven and forgiver alike. Watching this show, it begins to seem like not so great a stretch to imagine that we too are capable of making allowances for one another, that we too are capable of learning to play as a team. “After you watch ‘Ted Lasso,’ you start to think like Ted Lasso,” my husband said while we were watching. …

Even more than by market share and awards, the success of this show can be measured by what its popularity says about us. To borrow a phrase from Willie Nelson, we watched “Ted Lasso” and began to wonder if maybe we don’t have to hate each other after all.

New York Times DealBook, The Ted Lasso Way (June 3, 2023):

“Ted Lasso,” the saccharine story of an apparently clueless American who is appointed to run a British soccer team, ended this week. And while Lasso’s journey from barely knowing the rules to turning a group of misfits into a top team is not particularly realistic, management experts say some of his coaching strategies really are.

DealBook has picked out four management lessons from the fictional coach from Kansas that might apply to the real world.