We’re only halfway through Ted Lasso Season 3 and already it’s – by far – the show’s most expansive. The shortest episode this season is also the fourth-longest in Ted Lasso history. Storylines are spiraling off in rank, delightfully absurd profusion. We’re getting more characters and more screen time with beloved characters and more purposeful scenes that are also kind of self-indulgent (I’m not really complaining, but let’s at least be honest here). As I’m writing this, we’re just hours away from the release of Season 3 Episode 6, “Sunflowers,” which is a massive three-banana split about which Apple has forbidden me to say anything until tomorrow. But suffice it to say that “Sunflowers” neither decelerates nor deviates from the trend I’m describing.
All of which is to say that continuity errors, mistakes, and slip-ups are probably even more inevitable at this point in Ted Lasso‘s arc than they are on other shows. The kind of shows that are bound by pesky things like budget and runtimes and networks that say “No.” (I swear I love Ted Lasso and I double-swear that I’m not being snarky, but you cannot convince me that the next time Apple turns Jason Sudeikis down won’t be the first time.) And so I would like to present to you the kinda-small, kinda-big Ted Lasso error that I discovered in “Big Week,” the fourth episode of the current season.
The above screengrab comes from a pivotal scene early in the episode. AFC Richmond are about to take their six-match winning streak across town and put it on the line against West Ham United, the team owned by Rebecca Welton’s charming demon of a shitbag ex-husband Rupert and coached by Richmond’s former assistant coach Nate Shelley, who left Richmond for the top job elsewhere after stabbing Ted in the back by leaking the truth of his mid-match panic attacks to a journalist.
Ted and his coaching staff have just discovered security camera footage of Nate ripping the team’s “BELIEVE” sign in half and dumping it on Ted’s desk at the end of the previous season’s final match, which was also Nate’s final match as a Richmond assistant coach. (How Ted managed to keep the ripped sign a secret from the entire team and Coach Beard is a question sadly beyond my purview here.) Beard and Roy want to show the footage to the team as motivation, but Ted, whose bond with his own basic decency is apparently the strongest connection in the known universe, refuses to do so. It’s vintage Ted.
But the thing I want to point out is actually behind Nate. Here’s a slightly closer look at the same screengrab:
Coach Beard’s infamous white board, which he updates after every match to reflect Richmond’s new win-loss-draw record, clearly says the team is 6-0-1. And we already know, from the coaches as well as the larger screengrab above, that this footage was supposed to have been taken on May 8th of the same year – the very last day of Richmond’s season. (American readers, kindly remember that the date “8/5” only means August 5th in our country; in England, the day comes first, followed by the month.)
So what’s the big Ted Lasso error? Well – this wasn’t the 8th match of Richmond’s season. Last year, Richmond played in the EFL Championship. There are 24 teams in the Championship, and everybody plays everybody else twice. And though it probably doesn’t need to be pointed out, just in case, I’ll remind everyone that a team cannot play itself. So an EFL season is 46 matches long.
And we further know that Richmond’s record on the day of the final match was 23-16-6 – that’s 23 wins, 16 draws, and six losses. How do we know that? Because the Ted Lasso Season 2 finale showed us. Here’s what Beard’s white board looked like before the match:
So it looks like what happened is the good people responsible for filming Ted Lasso simply forgot to reset Beard’s white board before they filmed Nick Mohammed go Full Shelley and take all his frustration and anger and pent-up rage out on that poor “BELIEVE” sign. Is this a big deal? In the wise words of Roy Kent, “No.” It is, by contrast, a little deal. Ted Lasso is allowed to make mistakes, as are we all. But this show is normally so precise and meticulous and bewilderingly expansive that I never notice errors of any kind. So this one feels a little bit like if Ahab caught Moby-Dick in like Chapter 86, and then just sailed around crafting a bong out of his skull for the rest of the novel.
