Seven years before “Ted Lasso” premiered on Apple+ in 2020 and became a beacon of hope and kindness, the folksy, mustachioed, visor-wearing head coach of AFC Richmond, played by Jason Sudeikis, was the fictional head coach of a real professional soccer team: Tottenham Hotspur.
To promote its newly-acquired Premier League broadcast rights, NBC created a multimedia marketing campaign featuring Sudeikis’ then-unknown character as an American football coach who improbably becomes the head coach of a Premier League club. The promotion, which included the video “An American Coach in London” served as a light-hearted introduction to the Premier League for American sports fans who knew little to nothing about English soccer.
In addition to the videos, NBC’s promotional campaign included a variety of giveaways and experiences, including a partnership with Uber Eats that delivered free English breakfasts to people’s homes in branded British taxis and an interactive website that picked the Premier League team they should follow based on a series of pop-culture-related questions.
But among sports trading card collectors, the pièce de ré·sis·tance is the 2014 Ted Lasso rookie card, which a decade later has taken on near mythical status.
The Lasso card in its original packaging. (Photo: Bill Bergofin)
Part of a set produced in collaboration with Topps that included NBC’s Premier League commentators and personalities like Arlo White, Rebecca Lowe, and Robbie Mustoe, these cards were given out at bars and promo events in key markets to highlight NBC’s new soccer coverage. Now, if you’re lucky enough to own one of the Lasso cards, it could fetch big money. In July 2024, a near-mint PSA 8-graded example of the card sold for almost $3,000 at auction. PSA (Professional Sports Authenticator), by far the largest trading card grader in the industry, has only graded four copies of the Lasso card: two 8s, one 9 and only one deemed a gem-mint 10, according to the company’s population report.
While there have been knockoff Ted Lasso trading cards released since the Apple+ show’s creation, none of them come close in value to Topps’ 2014 card, mainly because of how rare it is now, said Michael Osacky, sports collectibles appraiser and president of Baseball In the Attic.
“I think a lot of the people who were given these free cards just threw them on the ground or were like, ‘What the heck is this?’ and threw them out or discarded them or forgot about them because they were given away for free,” Osacky said. “It was not a big deal.”
Another reason for the card’s increased value, according to Osacky, is because of what’s happened to the character in the years since the card was produced.
“Ted Lasso now is part of the…zeitgeist, if you will,” he said. “TV fans don’t have really anything to collect…whereas this show, those cards…you can physically collect them.”
According to Susan Lulgjuraj, marketing manager at Certified Collectibles Group, there are a total of six graded 2014 Ted Lasso rookie cards in existence; an astoundingly small number considering the hundreds that were originally given away.
“As the old saying in collecting goes, a card is worth what someone is willing to pay for it,” Lulgjuraj said.
Bill Bergofin, senior vice president of marketing at NBC Sports at the time, was charged with overseeing the promotion of the network’s Premier League coverage. He knew there was a rather large learning curve when it came to the typical American sports fan’s knowledge of professional soccer.
“There’s the myth that televised soccer would never make it in America…” said Bergofin. “Most people didn’t understand it. So we had a heavy lift.”
Bergofin had three goals: to reward the small, ardent fan base that would go to the bars on Saturday at 8:00 a.m. to watch European soccer matches and make them evangelists. Next, he wanted to educate the public at large about the sport by tapping into America’s love of “Downton Abbey” and other British television shows that were popular at the time. And lastly, he wanted America to fall in love with soccer.
To do this, he knew exactly who to call.
Guy Barnett, who was one of the founding partners of the Brooklyn Brothers creative ad agency, had worked with Bergofin over the years on campaigns for the NHL and World Extreme Cage Fighting, among others. Barnett, who was born in England but has lived in America since the mid-1990s, was a huge Premier League fan and desperately wanted in on the project. Once he signed on, they got to work.
Bergofin and Barnett wanted to find a centerpiece for the campaign, a way to appeal to existing soccer fans but also speak to potential new audiences. Inspired by a campaign Barnett had written previously for Major League Baseball featuring Craig Robinson and Nick Offerman, they wanted to create something similar using NBC celebrities who loved soccer.
John Oliver was originally their top choice but wasn’t available. But Sudeikis, who had just ended his nine-season stint on “Saturday Night Live” was. Barnett brainstormed ideas of how to use Sudeikis and came across an SNL skit called “Coach Bert” featuring Sudeikis as a college football coach.
“I thought, ‘Well, that would be interesting,’” said Barnett. “Why don’t we take that character, or somebody like him, and put him in charge of an English football team, and we’ll see what happens.”
Barnett’s idea was that this American character who knows nothing about professional soccer would be the lens through which viewers could learn how to watch, appreciate, and even love the sport.
“It would be taking somewhat of an American fool that we could help educate in English football and his journey would be an American fan’s journey as he discovered more about the teams, the league itself, who the players were, who the talent was and how it worked,” said Barnett. “So, we used him as a sort of ruse to kind of help explain English soccer to the American audience.”
That “American fool,” of course, would be Ted Lasso.
Lasso, in his initial introduction to audiences, wasn’t the warm, pun-loving, inspirational coach audiences would eventually embrace through Apple +, but a slightly arrogant buffoon parodying the average American sports fan.
“Ties and no playoffs. Why even do this?” he says during a press conference scene.
“And so we could see very quickly that we had something very special in both the character, but also the idea of this transplant, this-fish-out-of-water character who went to the UK and tried to understand English soccer,” said Barnett. “It’s interesting that…when we were writing it (the video), it was really to demonstrate that Americans didn’t understand football. But it was worth doing. It was a journey worth making.”
The trading cards were part of “bar kits” Bergofin’s team created that also included drinking glasses, T-shirts, and scarves. They were given to the media, social media influencers, and the general public.
“We partnered with Topps to create the cards for Ted Lasso and…our broadcasters…so obviously limited edition; only because we only made a handful to be distributed in bars in a few cities,” said Bergofin.”The rest is history. The Ted Lasso piece took off and then we saw just incredible growth for, I think not only Premier League, but the sport as a whole.”
Zvee Geffen was the brand manager at Topps during that time. Topps had just acquired the rights to the Premier League and was looking for ways to create a soccer portfolio of products. When Bergofin approached Topps about a collaboration, Geffen and his team got to work.
“It was a pretty cost-effective way for Topps to do some sampling,” Geffen said. “The cards existed for a product that we were putting out. So, it was a matter of slapping the EPL logo and the NBC Sports Network logo onto the cards and just running a parallel that would exist only in these promo packs.”
When it came to which Premier League team Lasso would coach, Barnett and Bergofin approached Donna-Maria Cullen, the executive director of Tottenham Hotspur FC, which happened also to be Barnett’s favorite football club from childhood.
“We were brave with our brand, there’s no two ways about it,” said Cullen. “But what NBC was doing was taking Premier League from behind the paywall of Fox and making it available to this huge audience… It would give us brand visibility, brand preferability. And it did. It kickstarted us as a club in the States with the fan base that’s grown from that time.”
Due to the popularity of the first Ted Lasso video, Bergofin and Barnett created a sequel, “The Return of Coach Lasso” a year later, which featured Sudeikis doing a live broadcast with Lowe.
“I think my overriding memory…was just how difficult it was to get through the scene without laughing, and how many times we had to stop because I kept laughing because the whole thing of it, of course, was there was no script,” said Lowe. “I knew that the first promo had gone viral and was huge. So, I had a feeling, especially after I saw what they were doing in that particular scene with me, I thought, ‘Oh gosh, this is going to be big as well.’ So, yeah, one of the best days of my career. Terrifying, but amazing in equal measure.”
As successful as the overall marketing campaign was, it’s the card that’s now attracted lasting attention. In fact, after interviewing Bergofin for this story, he came across a pleasant surprise.
“You know, it’s one of those things where many of us had boxes of baseball cards and other things that now, you know, we wish we held on to,” said Bergofin. “When we made these, I had a couple boxes of them in my office, and god only knows, I’m sure I had handed them out…. after we spoke, I went rummaging through all the usual suspect places that I might have it, and sure enough, there were two unopened packages of the cards with Lasso on top.”
Geffen compared the rarity of the 2014 Ted Lasso rookie cards with the legend of the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantle cards that were dumped into the ocean due to lack of sales; albeit on a much smaller scale.
“Just the irony of the value of the card versus how many were likely handed out…” he said. “Lasso was — it’s not like he was short printed — he was just put into the packs at (the same) rate as any of the other players. You hand things out at eight in the morning on a Saturday in a sports bar in New York and not many of them see the light of day. But that’s exactly what happened with the ‘52 Mantles… and that’s really how collectibles skyrocket for decades. They accumulate in value because no one thought they were going to be worth anything.”
NBC’s Premier League marketing campaign, of course, was a huge success. Its coverage across NBC, Peacock, and USA Network of the Premier League’s 2023-2024 season delivered the largest-ever audience for the league in U.S. media history, exceeding 546,000 viewers per match.
“I wasn’t sure the country was ready for a character that famous and that huge to be based in football, in soccer,” said Lowe. “I just didn’t think America was ready for a soccer phenomenon. And how wrong I was…”
But it wasn’t the campaign alone that helped make European soccer such a phenomenon in America. It was Ted Lasso himself; albeit, a more fleshed-out portrayal on his own TV show, the fish-out-of-water underdog — honest and naive and good almost to a fault — whose compassion and warmth for others was something the world didn’t know it needed.
Sudeikis as Ted Lasso in the AppleTV show. (Photo: Apple)
“That’s one thing that’s probably hard to recognize now,” Geffen said, “Looking back on 2014, soccer consumption in this country has come a really long way in 10 years.”
Bergofin said it was impossible to know they were creating a character that not only promoted soccer in America on such a grand scale, but that would live on in a television show years later launched during the COVID pandemic.
“I think everyone saw Ted Lasso as somebody we could all, you know, feel that there was a little bit of hope in the world,” Bergofin said.
According to data from eBay, after the final episode of Ted Lasso’s third season, global searches for “Ted Lasso card” on the platform increased more than 150 percent compared to the month prior. During the same month — June 2023 — global users searched “Ted Lasso” items more than 1,300 times a day on average.
Cullen said it’s been astonishing to watch the growth of soccer in America and Ted Lasso as a character.
“They (the cards) weren’t intended as a collector’s item…we’re really proud that we were at the birth of Ted Lasso,” she said. ”I think you’re going to have everyone ferreting in their boxes to see whether or not they’ve got any.”
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(Photo: Photo by 27th Annual SAG Awards/Getty Images for WarnerMedia; card image: Topps)
