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Why Real Coaches Want to Be Ted Lasso
He doesn’t know anything about his sport, but he knows how to get the best of his players. An unexpected hit TV show has become ‘required watching’ for coaches.
Updated July 14, 2021 2:50 pm ET
Utah Jazz coach Quin Snyder needed some help dealing with a tricky situation at work not long ago. He took advice from one of his favorite television shows.
“I don’t know if you watch ‘Ted Lasso,’ ” he said. “But sometimes your favourite animal is a goldfish because it has a memory of 10 seconds. That’s where we need to be.”
There was something curious about one of the NBA’s brightest minds borrowing a Ted Lasso pep talk. He could have leaned on decades of experience to get his basketball team past a stressful moment in the playoffs. He decided to invoke the folksy wisdom of a fictional American football coach managing an English soccer club.
It turns out he’s not the only person in professional sports channeling his inner Ted Lasso these days.
“It should be required watching for coaches,” Snyder said.
The model for modern coaches evolving from Lombardi to Lasso is a reflection of the shifting power dynamics in sports and how much has changed in management strategies over the past decade. Not every coach is relentlessly cheerful or comes to the office with freshly baked cookies for his boss. But it’s hard to look around the business world and not see hints of Jason Sudeikis’s character.
“I think it used to be an accepted leadership tactic to essentially abuse people,” said Brendan Hunt, one of the show’s creators and writers who also plays Coach Beard, Lasso’s sidekick. “I’m sure there are people who are, like, Now we’re soft. We’re not soft. We’re just not morons. We see better ways to get the best out of people. Humiliating them in front of their peers is probably not high on the list.”
Tyranny is out. Empathy is in. Coaches are getting the most of players by relating to them, not dictating to them, while keeping them accountable without coddling them. They are behaving more like Ted Lasso.
There is a takeaway from the series, now in its second season on Apple TV+, that applies to any line of work: The best coaches are the best managers of people.
It doesn’t matter that Lasso doesn’t know anything about the sport. What happens on the pitch is the least demanding part of his job. He soothes the neuroses of his star players. He injects his role players with confidence. He uses his superpower of emotional intelligence to balance competing personalities, foster an environment where everyone is capable of good work and build the culture of a team initially resistant to his charms.
The show found an early supporter in someone else who believes that winning should be fun, Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, who tweeted his praise for the series when most people were ready to dismiss it. He also has another reason to be a fan: One of his children happens to work at “Ted Lasso.”
“If there is a lesson on the show, it is that culture beats scheme,” Kerr said in an email. “The guy knows nothing about soccer but he has created a great atmosphere with the club that leads to winning.”
The coaches who are secure enough to empower people around them tend to be the ones who understand that a good idea might come from anyone or anywhere. They have the curiosity to ask for help and the humility to accept it.
Lasso takes suggestions for set pieces from his players and promotes Nate the kit man to assistant coach since he’s already crafting strategy in addition to cleaning laundry. The most famous example of Kerr going full Lasso was the time the Warriors went small in the 2015 NBA Finals and he deflected credit for the schematic tweak that helped win a championship to Nick U’Ren, a previously anonymous special assistant to the head coach.
Jason Sacks, the chief development officer of the Positive Coaching Alliance, says today’s coaches understand that connecting with players means dealing with them as individuals. It makes sense that Kerr has a different relationship with Stephen Curry and Draymond Green. They’re different people from different backgrounds. The only way to reach them is through different motivational tactics. “You see a lot of that with Ted Lasso, too,” Sacks said.
Chris Paul was binging the show between film sessions as the overachieving Phoenix Suns made the NBA Finals. Meanwhile his coach sounded like he was interviewing for Lasso’s staff as he discussed the bond he’s developed with his players. “When they make fun of me,” Monty Williams said, “that’s a sign that we’re tight.”
The imperial coach is becoming a relic as Ted Lasso’s temperament becomes the standard. If there is one word that encapsulates the Lasso school of management, it’s the word he litters around his flat: “BELIEVE.” That was also the word the Atlanta Hawks flaunted on their warmups during their own surprising playoff run.
It isn’t a coincidence that NBA players and coaches are studying this TV series. Lasso is a realistic portrayal of an effective leader in 2021 partly because his character was inspired by real people. And they don’t work in soccer.
“We’re drawing much more on a basketball coaching paradigm as we think of how he works and how he sees things,” Hunt said.
Before he played basketball in college, Sudeikis played in high school for a coach who loved John Wooden. When he started playing Ted Lasso, Sudeikis hung Wooden’s pyramid of success in his office. The set design was not a surprise to his friends: They know him well enough to know that Sudeikis’s go-to gift is a book of Wooden quotes.
There are basketball fingerprints all over this soccer club’s football coach. Sudeikis and Hunt met in Chicago and consider former Bulls coach Phil Jackson a sacred being. Gregg Popovich was another source for the writers as they brainstormed unorthodox ways for a coach to establish trust with his team. Lasso stages an exorcism to lift a curse on AFC Richmond. Popovich takes the San Antonio Spurs to long, wine-soaked dinners. “We thought of that as very Lassosesque,” Hunt said.
Art imitates life. Life is now imitating art. But the funny thing about this show becoming reality and Ted Lasso turning into a guru is that if a sports team asked the character’s writers for advice, their first response might very well be laughing him out of the room.
“I’d be somewhat disinclined to be responsible for the fortunes of a franchise that uses a sitcom as their philosophical north star,” Hunt said. “Trying to demonstrate good leadership was not our raison d’être. We’re still just trying to make a comedy.”
Write to Ben Cohen at [email protected]
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Appeared in the July 15, 2021, print edition as ‘Ted Lasso School of Leadership Inspires Real NBA Coaches.’
