Jason Sudeikis draws 16.9 billion minutes in Ted Lasso's U.S. soccer test
jason sudeikis turned a one-off NBC Sports joke into a show that pulled 16.9 billion viewing minutes in its third season. The Boston Globe’s question is narrower than the numbers: did Ted Lasso actually make soccer more popular in the United States, or did it simply give existing interest a friendlier mask?
August 2020 and the pandemic
Ted Lasso debuted in August 2020, after the title character had first appeared seven years earlier in an NBC Sports commercial for Premier League coverage. The timing mattered. The show arrived during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Ali Krieger said, “The show resonated because it’s about people first and soccer second” and “You didn’t need to have a deep understanding of soccer to connect with the show, and arrived at a time when people were craving that optimism and that connection and that hope.”
Three seasons later, the series had enough momentum to post 16.9 billion viewing minutes on Apple TV, according to Deadline. That kind of reach put Ted Lasso far beyond a niche sports-drama audience and into the mainstream streaming economy, which is why any argument about U.S. soccer popularity has to start with the size of the audience before it reaches the subject matter.
Twellman and Feldman on soccer
Taylor Twellman described the premise as an early sell. “It was like, ‘Hang on a minute: this is a college football coach, and not even one from D1?’” he said. “Coaching in the Premier League is not that easy, man.” His reaction gets at the show’s business edge: the setup is approachable, but the soccer world it enters is not.
Brad Feldman pushed harder on that gap. “Here’s the thing: when actual credentialed successful American coaches have gone over there, it’s been really hard,” he said, adding of Bob Bradley, “His short spell in English soccer, they were just so ready to tear him down.” Feldman then drew the sharpest line of the piece: “That may be the most far-fetched part of the show.”
Why the comedy worked
The show’s fourth season, due in August, shifts Lasso to coaching a women’s team. That keeps the franchise in the same lane: broad enough for casual viewers, specific enough to keep soccer on the screen. Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt, Bill Lawrence and Joe Kelly built a series that made the sport easy to enter, not easy to master.
On the evidence here, Ted Lasso probably did not single-handedly change American soccer culture, but it did something more measurable: it gave soccer a huge, low-friction gateway and kept it there for three seasons. That is the cleaner conclusion for the audience this story is really about — people who noticed the show, stayed for the minutes, and now get a fourth-season reset in August.
