The role Ted Lasso has played in Americas

In the summer season of 2020, the 12 months “Ted Lasso” debuted on Apple TV, the biggest viewers for a televised soccer match in the U.S. was 1.7 million. Shortly before the soccer-based sitcom returned for a fourth season last Wednesday, almost 63 million viewers in the U.S. watched the World Cup remaining.

Brendan Hunt, the actor who performs Lasso’s loyal sidekick Coach Beard in the sequence, can’t show the show is accountable for that growth. But since he can’t disprove it either, he’ll just go with the circulation.

“I would love it if we’ve had a role at all,” he said. “If we are a pebble in that avalanche, then I’m happy.”

What the Emmy-winning sequence has undeniably finished is convey soccer into thousands and thousands of unsuspecting households that had beforehand averted the game like a plague. So while Jason Sudeikis, the star and co-creator, alongside Hunt, of “Ted Lasso,” insists the show isn’t about soccer, the game sure will get a lot of screen time. And that has made the sport more palatable and well-liked for a public that can now relate to it.

“We tricked them by putting soccer in a comedy show,” Hunt said. “The first thing you’ve got to do to get somebody to become a soccer fan is just make them care about one team, to find one team.

“In this instance we’ve made them care about this fictional team and that easily can transmute, if you’re not careful, into caring about other teams. And then hopefully the sport itself.”

After a three-year hiatus, “Lasso” returned for Season 4 last week with the sequence’ eponymous title character, played by Sudeikis, returning to Richmond to coach a fledgling second-division girls’s workforce. Hunt’s understated character makes his first look of the season in Episode 2 Wednesday.

“He is clearly going through something,” Hunt said. “Is it just what happens to Beard when he’s away from Ted for too long or is there something important that has happened? We’ll find out before too long.”

Speaking of having gone through one thing, Hunt, who performs a fictional coach for a fictional workforce, spent the first half of his summer season being a very real journalist at a very real event, attending 14 World Cup video games in more than half a dozen stadiums — including the Spain-France semifinal in Arlington, Texas, which he watched from the press box, and the Spain-Argentina remaining, half of which he watched from discipline stage.

“That was a really cool experience,” said Hunt, who did a World Cup podcast with Rebecca Lowe, the studio host of Fox’s event coverage.

But for Hunt, 54, the most passionate soccer fan among the writers and actors on “Ted Lasso,” the game was an acquired style. Half a lifetime in the past, Hunt was a die-hard Chicago Bears fan working in residence with an improv group at a small, growing older theater in Amsterdam when he bought swept up in Dutch soccer tradition.

Eventually, he said, he was contributing weekly columns to Sp!ts, a free commuter newspaper in Amsterdam, chronicling his growing infatuation with the game. When Sudeikis, another Midwesterner, joined the comedy troupe, Hunt started proselytizing about the game, utilizing PlayStation video games to draw in Sudeikis.

“I found a secret that I had to tell everybody,” Hunt said. “When Jason came to Amsterdam, by that point I was fully a zealot. It was like a new recipe. ‘This thing is great!’

“I’ve been doing it ever since. I just have a slightly larger platform from which to do it.”

That platform is “Ted Lasso,” based around a soft-drawling school soccer coach, and Beard, his quiet but intense assistant. The idea debuted in a 2013 promo for NBC’s coverage of the English Premier League, then launched as a full-blown sitcom during the angst and concern of the coronavirus pandemic seven years later.

The sequence, with its message of optimism, kindness and persistence and its call to “be curious, not judgmental” — a sentiment Lasso mistakenly credit to Walt Whitman — proved to be the proper tonic for those attempting occasions. Before it paused after Season 3, it had turn into the most-watched authentic streaming sequence across all platforms and the first Apple TV show to cross the billion-minute mark in a single monitoring week.

But in addition to all the messaging and positivity, the show also included soccer. The offside rule and promotion and relegation are the butts of repeated jokes and there are discussions of techniques, positions, formations and other game-related particulars that would have beforehand pissed off viewers.

“Lasso,” however, proved U.S. soccer IQ was larger than anticipated; the game might not have turn into totally mainstream, but it was no longer a international idea.

“There’s just a wider sense of like, ‘yeah, we’re fine. Soccer’s fine,’” Hunt said of the U.S. public. “We don’t need to explain it to people or impress it upon people. The World Cup has sort of finally cemented that.

“It feels like less and less of a capital S struggle right now.”

For Hunt, who has been a season-ticket holder for LAFC and Angel City, getting to be a credentialed World Cup journalist — and a participant in the halftime show at the ultimate — have been once such far-fetched goals that they never even made his bucket record. Getting paid to write scripts for a project he’s passionate about, then act out those scripts as a make-believe coach, was once only barely less unbelievable.

Yet Hunt has finished it all — and after a three-year break he’s back doing it again.

“It’s definitely fun,” he said. “For one thing it makes me a little more useful in the writers’ room than I would be on ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ And it also means that a world that I already really enjoy has now opened its arms to us.

“The world of football, to have responded so well to this show, has been truly a touching part of this experience.”

And no one can’t show the show hasn’t played at least a small role in making the U.S. a soccer nation at last.