Ted Lasso, Understanding People and Why It’s Not Really About Football - Part One

I have always thought Ted Lasso was one of those programmes that is very easy to describe badly. You could say it is a comedy about an American football coach coming over to England to manage a Premier League team despite knowing very little about the game. And technically that is true. But it is also completely missing the point. Because Ted Lasso has never really been about football. There is a lot of football in it, obviously. There are changing rooms, matches, tactics, managers, supporters, press conferences and people shouting things from the touchline. But it isn't really about football. In fact, the more I have watched it, the more I think football is simply the excuse for putting a group of very different people into the same place and seeing what happens to them.

Now that the programme has returned, I found myself thinking again about why it became so influential and why people connected with it so strongly in the first place. It wasn't just because it was funny, although it is. It wasn't just because Ted is a likeable character, although he generally is. I think a lot of it comes down to the way the writers treat the people in it. The comedy tends to happen around the characters rather than at their expense. We are allowed to laugh at Roy Kent being Roy Kent, Jamie being ridiculously pleased with himself, Ted being completely baffled by something very English or Rebecca trying to retain some sort of dignity in the middle of chaos. But the programme rarely says, "Look at this ridiculous person." Instead, it gradually says, "Look at this person properly."

And I think that is one of the reasons the characters stay with you.

They are three-dimensional.

They have worries, joy, insecurities, strengths, foibles, egos, kindness, jealousy, confidence, fear and, importantly, faults. Lots of faults. Nobody gets to be entirely right all of the time and nobody is reduced to being the villain simply because they have behaved badly. That does not mean bad behaviour is ignored or excused. Quite the opposite. It means we are often shown enough of the person to understand where some of that behaviour might be coming from.

That is a much more interesting way of looking at people.

And still, just to be clear, it isn't really about football.

Take Roy Kent. It would have been very easy to write Roy as the angry ex-footballer who swears a lot and frightens everyone. That would probably have worked for a few episodes. But over time we see much more of him. We see his loyalty, uncertainty, tenderness, frustration, awkwardness and his difficulty expressing things in anything other than the verbal equivalent of kicking a door open. Jamie Tartt could easily have remained the arrogant young footballer who thinks the world revolves around him, but again we gradually begin to see where some of that bravado comes from. Rebecca could simply have been the wealthy, intimidating club owner, Nate the nervous kit man and Ted the relentlessly cheerful American. Instead, all of them become something more complicated.

And Ted is perhaps the most interesting of the lot because he has this habit of looking beyond the immediate behaviour. Someone is angry and he seems to wonder what is behind the anger. Someone is arrogant and he becomes curious about what might be underneath the confidence. Somebody is difficult and rather than immediately deciding that they are simply a difficult person, he often wants to know a little more. That curiosity changes the way he deals with people.

That doesn't mean he becomes a doormat.

It means he sees more than one layer.

I find that fascinating because it is something that comes up quite often in the work I do with clients. As people begin to feel calmer and more confident, they sometimes start noticing other people's behaviour in a different way. They are not suddenly surrounded by nicer people. The difficult colleague is still difficult. The family member who always makes that irritating comment may still make it. The impatient person in the queue hasn't magically undergone a personality transplant. What can change is the way the client interprets what is happening.

Instead of immediately thinking, "What have I done?" or "Why are they behaving like that towards me?", they start to consider, "What might be going on with them?"

That sounds like a small change in wording, but it can be a very big shift in thinking.

One interpretation immediately makes the situation personal. The other creates some distance.

If somebody snaps at us, it is very easy to assume their reaction is about us. If someone is quieter than usual, we can wonder whether we have upset them. If a message goes unanswered, the mind can start putting together a whole story about what that means. Before we know it, we have taken a ten-second interaction and turned it into a two-hour internal meeting, complete with imaginary evidence, possible explanations and several conversations that have never actually happened.

Most of us can be very creative when we are worrying.

But what if it wasn't about us?

What if the person was tired? What if they were worried? What if something completely unrelated had happened five minutes before we spoke to them? What if the person constantly talking about how successful they are is actually more insecure than they appear? What if the person trying to control everything is feeling completely out of control themselves?

We don't know.

And that is actually the useful bit.

We don't need to know.

We simply need to recognise that our first interpretation might not be the only possible explanation.

Again, this doesn't mean making excuses for people. I think that distinction is very important. Understanding someone's behaviour doesn't mean accepting it. If somebody repeatedly behaves badly towards you, you do not have to tolerate it because you have worked out why they might be doing it. Understanding why somebody is angry doesn't make their anger your responsibility. Understanding that someone has had a difficult past doesn't automatically give them permission to make your present difficult.

What understanding can do is give you more choice in how you respond.

And I think Ted Lasso does this extremely well.

The programme often separates the person from the behaviour. A character can do something selfish, hurtful or ridiculous without immediately being reduced to "a bad person". We might dislike what they have done while still understanding something about why they did it. That creates a very different emotional response in the viewer, because it asks us to stay curious rather than simply judge.

It also feels much more like real life.

People are rarely one thing.

Somebody can be generous and incredibly irritating. Confident and insecure. Funny and difficult. Supportive one day and selfish the next. Calm at work and anxious at home. We often like neat labels because they make life easier. Good person. Bad person. Nice person. Difficult person. But human beings have an annoying habit of refusing to stay inside the boxes we put them in.

Which is probably another reason why Ted Lasso isn't really about football.

The football just gives everybody somewhere to bump into each other.

One thing I often notice is how quickly we can take other people's behaviour personally, particularly when we are already feeling stressed or anxious. When the brain is in that state, it becomes very good at scanning for problems. A look on someone's face, a change in tone, somebody failing to say hello in quite the right way, a delayed message or a conversation that suddenly goes quiet can all become evidence.

"They're annoyed with me."

"I've done something wrong."

"They don't like me."

And once the brain settles on that explanation, it can become incredibly good at collecting further evidence to prove itself right.

But when people begin to feel more settled, there can be a little more room between what happens and the meaning they give to it.

That space matters.

It gives you time to think.

It allows you to ask whether there might be another explanation.

It helps you respond rather than simply react.

And I think Ted does that constantly. He often seems to create a gap between another person's behaviour and his own response to it. Sometimes he gets it wrong, of course, because he is human too, and the programme makes a point of showing us that. Ted is supportive, optimistic and very good at seeing things in other people, but he is not presented as someone who has everything sorted. He has worries, fears, his own coping mechanisms and his own blind spots.

That makes him far more interesting.

If Ted simply wandered around being relentlessly cheerful, dispensing wisdom and fixing everybody else's problems, I suspect we would all get fed up with him fairly quickly. Instead, the programme shows that somebody can be extremely good at helping other people while still having things they need to deal with themselves.

That seems pretty realistic to me.

The other part of this I really like is the idea of curiosity.

Curiosity is very different from judgement.

If somebody is rude to us, judgement says, "What an awful person."

Curiosity might say, "That was rude. I wonder what is going on there?"

Notice that the behaviour has not suddenly become acceptable. We are not pretending it didn't happen. We are simply opening up another possibility.

That can be hugely useful because the less personally we take everything happening around us, the less control other people's moods and behaviours can have over ours.

This can be quite freeing.

I can't control whether somebody wakes up in a bad mood.

I can become better at not automatically assuming their bad mood is my responsibility.

I can't control every comment somebody makes.

I can become better at deciding whether I want that comment occupying space in my head for the rest of the day.

I can't stop a difficult person being difficult.

I can become more confident about how I deal with them.

That is where the shift really matters.

People sometimes imagine that feeling better means life becomes easier, everybody around them becomes kinder and difficult situations stop happening.

Unfortunately, no.

That would be an excellent service to offer, but I don't think I'm going to be able to promise it.

What can change is our ability to deal with the world that is actually there.

We become less reactive. We recover more quickly. We stop endlessly replaying things. We begin to recognise where our responsibility ends and somebody else's begins. We can be understanding without becoming responsible for fixing everyone.

That last point is particularly important.

Being able to understand why somebody behaves the way they do doesn't mean you have to rescue them. You can feel empathy for someone while still having boundaries. You can understand that someone is struggling and still decide that you do not want to be spoken to in a certain way. You can appreciate somebody's background without allowing it to become a permanent excuse.

Understanding is useful.

Over-responsibility isn't.

And perhaps that is one of the reasons the characters in Ted Lasso feel so real. They are given opportunities to change, but nobody can really do the changing for them. Ted can encourage them, challenge them or sometimes simply see something in them that they haven't yet seen in themselves, but ultimately they still have to make their own decisions.

That feels very close to therapy in many ways.

The aim is not for somebody else to tell you exactly how to live your life. It is about helping you get into a better place to think, make decisions and respond in ways that work better for you.

Sometimes that includes looking at the people around you differently.

Noticing their patterns.

Seeing that the person who always has to win may need winning more than you do. Recognising that the person who constantly criticises might be dealing with their own insecurities. Understanding that someone else's reaction may say far more about what is happening in their world than it does about you.

And when that happens, situations can lose some of their emotional weight.

The colleague's comment becomes a comment rather than something you analyse for the next three days.

The family member's mood stays their mood.

The unanswered message remains an unanswered message rather than becoming proof that something terrible has happened.

You stop needing to solve every mystery.

That can make life considerably quieter.

So yes, I am very pleased Ted Lasso is back. I am interested to see where the writers take these characters because they have always been very good at showing that people are much more complicated than they first appear. We see their worries, their joy, their strange habits, their strengths and their weaknesses. We see them get things right and get things very wrong. And through Ted, we are often invited to look a little deeper before deciding exactly who someone is.

It is funny, warm and at times surprisingly thoughtful.

And apparently there is some football in it too.

Although by now I think we've established that it isn't really about football.

It is about people.

It is about how we interpret one another, how quickly we judge, how easily we take things personally and how different a situation can feel when we look at it from another angle.

And perhaps that is the bit worth taking away.

You do not have to excuse poor behaviour.

You do not have to become responsible for everyone else's problems.

You do not have to work out exactly why every person behaves the way they do.

But becoming a little more curious about other people's behaviour can sometimes stop you making it automatically about you.

And when you can do that, you often find yourself with more control over the only part of the situation you really can influence.

Your own response.

Which, for a programme that isn't really about football, is quite a useful lesson.