“It’s been a hell of a run.” Inside Ted Lasso’s second act and life after coaching
Trent Crimm, Chief Football Writer

For this profile, I meet Ted Lasso at a charming Russian restaurant in North London, where the pelmenis are delicious and they have every flavor of vodka you could imagine and some you wouldn’t wish to. (Horseradish vodka? For what?)

Ted Lasso is uninterested in the vodka, of course. Since his heart attack last fall, he’s gone teetotal, abandoning his former liking for a glass of whiskey for trendy “mocktails” and his usual diet of pub fare for brown rice and grilled vegetables. He hasn’t gone full vegetarian yet, but red meat is definitely no longer on the menu.

“The mocktails are pretty fun,” Lasso tells me of his new lifestyle, “But either way, the doctors were pretty clear, if I didn’t start taking care of myself properly, as they put it, I’d be back in intensive care within a year or two.” He shrugs and says, “And I’d like to see Henry graduate, so.”

He delivers that line in a light tone that belies the seriousness of the topic, both because his own father didn’t live to see him graduate, and because on that fateful day, it was an open question whether Ted Lasso would live long enough to see his son’s graduation.

Practically everyone knows the details, but here is the story in brief: in early October, Ted Lasso went into cardiac arrest in Rebecca Welton’s office. He was rushed to hospital and straight into emergency surgery, which saved his life. He spent over two months out on medical leave, with Roy Kent taking over as caretaker manager, and in May of this year, Ted Lasso announced his retirement as Richmond’s manager. Instead, he would be joining Richmond’s academy as the new director (replacing the outgoing director) and, in a surprise twist, also becoming part-owner of the club, thanks to Alistair Crane selling him half of his shares at, reportedly, the low cost of one pound.

Over the pelmeni and vareniki dumplings, I ask him outright if Alistair Crane sold him a 2.5% stake in the club for only one pound. Lasso just gives me that legendary smile of his, dimples on display, eyes twinkling.

“Well, Trent, I could tell you that, but then I’d have Alistair Crane hollering at me about revealing him to be a generous and kind-hearted man, underneath all the scowling,” Lasso tells me.

What about the rumor that Alistair Crane has already written into his will that Ted Lasso will gain the remaining 3.4% of his stake in the club?

Lasso just shakes his head. “Lips are sealed. Plus, I’m convinced Alistair’s gonna live forever, so I’m not worrying over it.”

When I finally get ahold of Alistair Crane, I’m treated to a five minute scold, complete with foul language, before Crane finally says to me, “Ted Lasso has done more for this club than anyone else in living memory, why shouldn’t he own a part of it?”

When I put it to him that essentially giving away valuable ownership shares in a Premier League club is a shockingly generous gesture, one that indicates the depth of gratitude and friendship between the two men, Crane says, in genuine exasperation, “Oh, fuck off,” before hanging up.

But Alistair Crane is just one among many of Ted Lasso’s admirers. A running joke among football fans is how even supporters of rival clubs can’t bring themselves to hate Lasso, even when his club’s beating theirs in a match, or pipping them to Champions League qualification.

As a friend of mine who is a lifelong Chelsea supporter (and thus deeply bitter about the club’s descent into mid-table mediocrity over the last few seasons) said to me once, in real frustration, “I ought to hate him, I should hate him, but I can’t do it. He’s just too damned decent!”

News of Lasso's heart attack went through the league like a thunderbolt, with seemingly every pundit, fan, player and opposing manager lining up to sing Lasso’s praises and wish him well. I ask if he was surprised by the outpouring of support after his heart attack.

“I was humbled by it,” Lasso tells me. “Just realizing how many people, people who’ve never met you, are rooting for you to be okay…it’s a humbling feeling. I never want to take that for granted. Truly.”

The goodwill towards Ted Lasso is as close to unanimous as the British public can get about anyone not named Sir David Attenborough, and nowhere is that goodwill more obvious than when it comes to Lasso’s personal relationship with Rebecca Welton, the majority owner of AFC Richmond. For years now, the nature of their relationship has been speculated on by the tabloid media, but when it emerged this past fall that Lasso and his son Henry had moved into Ms. Welton’s London residence, the reaction among the general public was muted. (No matter how many blaring headlines appeared in certain tabloids.) It was a rather ironic twist that by the time actual evidence appeared of their relationship being more than platonic, the speculation had died down to the point where people met the confirmation with a shrug.

“They won us the title, mate,” one Richmond fan said to me in a pub. “You think I give a shit about what they get up to in the bedroom after the trophies they've won? Rebecca Welton could parade Coach Lasso down the street with him in a leash and nothing but his underpants on and I would still not give a single fuck.”

Lasso chokes on his mocktail when I relay this quote to him. “Well, uh, that is certainly a robust way to show their support,” he manages to say, face pink. “But I don’t think there’s anything particularly scandalous about me and Rebecca, so it’s nice to hear others feel the same.”

He smilingly won’t go into any further detail than that, but the moment at his last home game said it all. Ted Lasso doing the lap of honor to salute the fans, teary-eyed throughout as he clapped, only pausing when yet another one of his players would pull him into an embrace. The fans gave him a standing ovation in return, the song they’d coined for him years ago ringing through the stadium. Right before he was about to disappear into the tunnel, looking overcome, Rebecca Welton emerged from the crowd to give him a hug and a quick kiss to the mouth, before they disappeared arm-in-arm through the tunnel, the fans roaring both their names. Open confirmation without a word being spoken, and the public on their side throughout, just as it had been for the past year.

But it would have felt churlish, somehow, to quibble at the relationship between two consenting, single adults—at least in this context, with the memory of Lasso’s health issues still so vivid, with the knowledge that this would be the last time we would ever see him on Richmond’s pitch as its coach. Of course we all clapped and cheered for that kiss, how could we not? It was the sort of fairytale ending you don’t expect to see in real life, except that fairytale endings have been Ted Lasso’s bread and butter for the past seven years in England. From the unlikely promotion from the Championship, to the even more unlikely Premier League title win (with a few FA Cup trophies and notable Champions League runs mixed in) we’ve gotten used to Ted Lasso’s particular brand of magic.

I put the question to him: does his career in England ever strike him as unlikely? Did he have any idea, seven years ago, that this is where it would all end, with him as the most successful coach in Richmond’s history?

“Heck no,” Lasso tells me without hesitation. “It is safe to say that seven years ago, I had absolutely no idea what I was in for.” His smile turns a little rueful, as he adds, “Which y’all in the press made very clear.”

I cannot confirm that I-being reminded of my first introduction to Coach Lasso and my now-infamous demand to know if this was all a fucking joke—blush a bit, but I cannot not confirm it either.

“But no,” Lasso continues. “No, I never saw any of this coming.” His smile grows smaller, more wistful, as he says, “As a wise person told me, it’s been a hell of a run. I’ve been lucky.”

Then why bring it all to an end?

Lasso is quiet for a moment, fingers drumming on the table. “Because doing the job, the way I was doing it, was killing me,” he admits at last. “It was killing me, and I couldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all myself. So the universe decided to give me a sign, a painful one, and I had to listen.”

It’s no secret that managing a football team is a notoriously stressful and lonely position—Pep Guardiola famously lost most of his hair during his first year coaching Barcelona—but Ted Lasso always seemed to carry the burden more lightly than his peers, his bright, mustachioed smile and aw-shucks charm dazzling all who witnessed it. It was the reason his heart attack came as such a shock, not just because you never expect someone to have a heart attack, but because we didn’t expect it for him in particular.

“What was wrong with the way you were doing the job?” I ask.

Another long pause from Lasso—which is rare, I must say. Lasso’s ease with the press, even under the most stressful of circumstances, is legendary. It’s shocking to see the man at a loss for words.

“I didn’t know when to stop doing it,” Lasso finally says. “And I didn’t know how not to take it home with me.” Haltingly, carefully, he starts to detail what previously had only been hinted at by club sources, and only then anonymously—the ways in which he took on more and more responsibilities within the club, wanting to be apprised of the goings-on with the academy, the marketing and PR department, scouting and transfers, so on and so forth. Not because anyone at the club asked him to take on the extra duties, but because he couldn’t help but get involved. He loved the work, and felt a responsibility to do it well. And the more he was able to take on and still lead the club to success, the more he felt he had to keep up with it, until it finally began to overwhelm even his indefatigable energies.

“I was struggling,” Lasso concedes. “I wasn’t sleeping well, I wasn’t eating right. I would be anxious and worried over everything—even the smallest things—but I’d gotten myself into such a state that I couldn’t even admit how bad it was, not even to myself.”

Did anyone else suspect, or try to talk to him about it?

“Coach Beard, he had an idea that I was struggling, but not how bad.” Lasso shakes his head a little. “I think…if anything, that’s been the real eye-opener for me. I look at the support I have now, the way people have been lifting me up all year long, and I wish I could go back in time and tell myself, “It’s going to be all right. You can ask for help, and the world won’t end when you do.’”

He is, he tells me, still bowled over by his good luck that he wasn’t alone in his office when he went into cardiac arrest, but that he’d gone upstairs to Rebecca Welton’s office for a quick chat. He admits that he had been experiencing symptoms for a while that day, but had written them off as heartburn, or as another one of the panic attacks he’d been secretly struggling with for years. “It’s incredible the ways you can keep fooling yourself that you’re all right, right up until the moment your heart’s exploding inside your chest and every breath you take feels like your last,” Lasso tells me.

Carefully, I ask about the panic attacks. Lasso is a little uncomfortable going into detail, but he willingly shares that he’s struggled with anxiety and depression in the past, but has recently gone and found a therapist who has given him the tools to better handle his mental health before it hits a crisis point. And in the wake of his heart attack, his son moved to London to be closer to him. The team and his coworkers all rallied around him. He was told that he would recover, but that he would need to slow down and take care of himself properly.

And once Ted Lasso was finally forced to slow down, he looked around at his life, and he didn’t like what he saw.

“I realized I could keep going down the path I was going, and end up not only letting everyone around me down, but letting myself down,” Lasso says. “I was going to be headed for an even worse crash.”

And he didn’t want to crash. He wanted to spend time with his son and with the woman he was falling in love with. He also wanted the best for the team he loved, for the players who trusted him, and the supporters whose hopes rested on his shoulders. And as the weeks passed, and as his health slowly improved, Lasso came to the conclusion that Richmond, the club whose success he’d been so instrumental in, had finally reached the point where it could survive and even thrive without him.

And that he, very possibly, could survive and even thrive without coaching.

It was a difficult process, confiding in those closest to him of his decision. Harder, he says, because of how unfailingly supportive everyone was. The club knew by December, and started an internal search for a successor, but—in another stroke of good luck—that was the time in which Richmond’s play and results started to improve, with Roy Kent eventually leading the team to a top-four spot and automatic Champions League qualification by April.

And so in May, Ted Lasso and AFC Richmond announced that he would be stepping down as coach by season’s end. The shock and sting of the announcement was soothed by the fact that Lasso would be staying on as the new academy director and (thanks to Alistair Crane’s generosity) as a minority owner, but even so—it was an earthquake within English football. The pundits disapproved, the fans were upset and grieving. But Lasso was steadfast. The club would be all right without him, the players were in safe hands with Roy Kent and the rest of the coaching staff, which would remain unchanged.

And as the reality sank in, it began to seem fitting, somehow, that this was how the Lasso experiment ended, that this strange American manager who managed to give us all so many fairy-tale endings would be able to write his own ending—going out on his own terms, with his beloved club left in a safe pair of hands and in good standing.

It seems even more fitting now, looking at Lasso across the table. He looks healthy and fit, but moreover, he looks calm, settled in his skin. If he’s worried about what life will look like for him after coaching, it doesn’t show. He’s confident that he will be able to make Richmond’s academy (already well-regarded) into even more of a success, that he will be able to step back and let Roy Kent coach the first-team squad and take Richmond into a new era, one where he will no longer play the role of unlikely talisman.

And who knows? He might be right. As one of the many people who were proven wrong about Ted Lasso, I know better now than to bet against him.

Trent Crimm @crimmt
There is something wildly hilarious about working for weeks on an in-depth profile of Ted Lasso, only for it to be overshadowed on the day of publication by photos of Rebecca Welton wearing a ring on her left hand.

Trent Crimm @crimmt
Is she engaged? Secretly married? Or just a fabulously wealthy woman who bought herself a wildly expensive sapphire and diamond ring? Judging from the trending topics, the internet is aflame trying to figure it out.

Trent Crimm @crimmt
The answer, per Ted Lasso himself, is a). They are engaged.

Trent Crimm @crimmt
Here is my profile of the man who, when asked about his engagement, confirmed it by saying, “She liked it, so I put a ring on it.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/footb…