12. 1×10 – “The Hope That Kills You”
In 1×09, “All Apologies”, Beard tells Ted that, at the professional level, winning matters and that relationships between players, or the personal growth of the players, is not the main goal. By the end of the episode, Richmond have been relegated. But flashpoints in the episode: the dual promotions of Nate and Isaac, the crowd singing to Roy, the repeated cuts to the joyful and then mourning pub, Rebecca’s decision to retain Ted, and Ted’s letter to Jamie all reveal that sports have always been a conduit for community-building. While most sports dramas try to graft that idea on after-the-fact, or only through the thrill of victory, “The Hope That Kills You” merely lands a plane that has been nine episodes in the making.
Key Moment: After leaving the field with an injury, sure to retire, Roy hides in the locker room. Keeley goes down to comfort him, foreshadowing Ted’s closing argument: that the only thing worse than being sad is to be sad and alone.
11. 2×01 – “Goodbye Earl”
After accidentally killing the team’s mascot with a penalty kick, Dani gets a case of the yips, which snaps the rest of the episode into place: after getting relegated, Ted’s confidence is shaken, and he starts losing control — Nate’s emerging spite and the introduction of Dr. Sharon dislodge some of the control he had once had on the team. Meanwhile, Roy struggles to acclimate to his new post-retirement lifestyle, which parallels the temporary demise of Dani’s “Fútbol is Life” motto. While “Goodbye Earl” isn’t a barnburner in the sense that “No Weddings and a Funeral” or “Rainbow” are, it nicely sets up the show’s second season and is overall funnier than the second half of season one had been (see Rebecca’s “Oh God, did we really make Michael Jordan cry?”).
Key Moment: The Nate Arc begins: when Will, the new Kit Man, asks to take off early for his mother’s birthday, Nate derides him. It’s an early sign of how Nate constructs an identity for himself around his power.
10. 2×04 – “Carol of the Bells”
Just as Ted Lasso has a push-and-pull relationship with archetypical sports dramas, “Carol of the Bells” similarly resists the gravitational pull of the Christmas episode. Without doing a capital-s Subversion of the genre, “Carol” steers clear of making Christmas its subject, instead using the holiday as an alternative vehicle outside of the clubhouse. It turns out that, outside the tidy narratives of wins and losses, the series’ messages of hope, friendship, and optimism can still hold up.
Key Moment: With a dozen or so players from around the world crammed into his tiny home, Higgins makes a touching speech about belonging and family. So often in the background or a punchline, deep down, Higgins is the character the show most wants us to be: humble, hospitable, and open-hearted.
9. 3×06 – “Sunflowers”
“Sunflowers”, like many other episodes in the third season, has many simultaneous stories that stretch the show far beyond the half-hour comedy format that it started with. But critically, each of these stories orbits around a single concept: moving Richmond away from home, where they can reflect and discover something about themselves. Because it has a unified vision, it works incredibly well.
The episode is funny (Jamie’s encyclopedic knowledge of Amsterdam is charming, as is Dani’s desire to see a single tulip) but deeply emotive as well (see Roy and Jamie’s nighttime bike ride and Colin’s conversation with Trent). Ted and Rebecca’s plotlines are somewhat questionable, and your mileage may vary with the concepts of Ted drug placebo-ing his way to creating a 50-year-old football strategy and Rebecca spending the night in a male stranger’s houseboat, but if you can keep the shades of cynicism away, “Sunflowers” is one of the strongest moments of the season.
Key Moment: Colin’s canalside conversation with Trent is truly touching. Colin vocalizes the fears around coming out that have dogged him all season. The courage that Trent shows in seeking Colin out underscores the show’s theme of doing the hard thing to support someone who needs it. The moment is most impressive because it is between two relatively inconsequential characters but is still moving.
8. 1×05 – “Tan Lines”
The moment when Ted Lasso found its footing. Top-to-bottom, “Tan Lines” is a masterwork, pulling together several indispensable threads: Ted’s belief in selflessness and teamwork, his ability to positively influence others (as Isaac makes space on the bench for Nate, and Roy helps up Sam), his friendship with Beard, and the seasons-long heartbreak that is his marriage. While “Tan Lines” is the start of Ted winning over the AFC Richmond fanbase, it’s also the moment that Ted as a character becomes real: he is an optimist and a lover of community, and nothing will shake those beliefs.
Key Moment: Ted decides to swap out Jamie, and the entire stadium screams “wanker” at him. Meanwhile, his marriage is collapsing because Michelle doesn’t love him any longer. Despite this enormous blow to his self-image, Ted decides to stick to his principles. He is clearly terrified but holds fast to his belief that Jamie does not belong on the pitch.
7. 3×08 – “We’ll Never Have Paris”
A return to form amid the season three doldrums, “We’ll Never Have Paris” shows the beauty of friends having a hard conversation. Nate fails to convene his version of the Diamond Dogs at West Ham, indicating that he is missing so much of the support he felt at Richmond. Beard steps in to support Henry while Ted is being supported by Rebecca, and Jack and Roy both fail to look after Keeley when her explicit video circulates online.
Jack and Roy’s incompetence is visceral and maddening, which is what pulls this well-orchestrated episode together: we’ve been taught over three seasons what these two are supposed to do for Keeley at this moment, and they don’t live up to it. Meanwhile, Jamie, who has relentlessly been trying to get better since losing out on his spot at Man City, finally does the right thing.
Key Moment: Beard using “Hey Jude” to explain to Henry that he is there for him is Ted Lasso firing on all cylinders: completely earnest and a beautiful portrait of friendship. Begone, cynics!
6. 3×09 – “La Locker Room Aux Folles”
A complex episode, if there ever was one. On Colin’s side, a season-long arc gets relief, and his episode-ending conversation with Isaac helps bring some of his fears to light. Isaac’s intense reaction to Colin’s sexuality is multilayered and, at times, confusing. But Isaac has always been a mercurial character with tangled emotions, and as Roy points out in his press conference, it will never be fully comprehensible. So while part of me thought “Isaac wouldn’t do that” at some points in the episode (just as I thought during the barbaric West Ham match earlier in the season), I’m willing to give it a pass, especially given the explanation he offers Colin at the episode’s end.
With this confusing dynamic at the episode’s center, this is a much more tense episode of Ted Lasso than we’re used to. The show rides the discomfort well, offering a few truly hilarious moments (Jamie and Sam’s silent banter over the captainship), the demise of Keeley’s relationship with Jack, Ted’s recognition of the loneliness that Colin must have felt, and Nate’s realization that he doesn’t want to be like Rupert. So, while this isn’t the super-happy-fun Ted Lasso that we all know and love, it still has the show’s spirit and heart — quite a transformation.
Key Moment: Isaac’s antagonism toward Colin in the first half of the episode is like a dark cloud over the whole affair — which makes Colin’s pure joy at the end of the match, having come out to the team and been accepted by them, in a sun-soaked afternoon in which he had two assists, all the more powerful.
5. 2×03 – “Do the Right-est Thing”
Nora is a welcome addition to Ted Lasso‘s dynamic, inspiring Rebecca to look inward and set a good example. Meanwhile, Jamie struggles to find a place for himself on a team that no longer trusts him. Ted tries to fix Jamie’s problem with his Led Tasso routine, which fails — showing that all of the motivational hijinks in the world can’t get a team over an entrenched dispute. But when a real common enemy arrives in the form of Dubai Air, the team quickly falls into place. The episode shows that when you try to build a connection for the sake of your ego (to show others that you are good), you will fail. Instead, you need to do the right-est thing.
Key Moment: “We’re a team, ain’t we? Got to wear the same kit.” When Sam starts his protest against Dubai Air’s environmental destruction, Jamie realizes that his way to win back the team’s affection is to humble himself, become part of the team, and put their needs forward — meaning, being the first white person to decide to join in the protest. While Sam is initially not persuaded by Jamie’s gesture, it builds both of their characters: Sam grows toward leadership, while Jamie becomes more humble.
4. 2×05 – “Rainbow”
Early in the episode, Nate offers to give Isaac a talking-to about his leadership, and Ted laughs — eventually deciding to pull in Roy, who is not on the coaching staff, to do the work for him. While Ted surely thought he was doing the best he could by having Isaac speak to Roy (a longtime role model), the moment was surely degrading to an already-vulnerable Nate. So, while “Rainbow” is best remembered for Roy’s triumphant return to Richmond, it is also the moment Nate’s villain arc becomes intractable. Nate cannot help but see Roy as a threat to own his power in the club, revealing the misunderstanding at the heart of his character: that leadership is about power, not about trust.
Key Moment: Typically, a stadium full of people singing a song about you is not a humbling experience. But just as Roy had to humble Isaac in a pickup game to reconnect the captain to his love of the game, Roy had to humble himself by admitting that Ted was right and that he belonged on the coaching staff.
3. 2×10 – “No Weddings and a Funeral”
The show rights the ship in this barnburner: electrifyingly funny and moving (sometimes at once), “No Weddings and a Funeral” dives deeply into both Rebecca’s and Ted’s childhoods while moving forward Roy’s relationship with Keeley and reveals that Jamie still loves her. Sprinkle in some incredible Flo dialogue (“Rupert, I think about your death every single day. I can’t wait. I’m gonna wear red to your funeral”) and an excellent bit about footballers wearing dress shoes, this episode is everything Ted Lasso claims to be.
Key Moment: “And I knew right then and there that I was never gonna let anybody get by me without understanding that they might be hurting inside.” In his description of his father’s suicide, Ted lays out the show’s central premise: it’s not about rampant optimism for the sake of good vibes. It’s about understanding, as deeply as you can, that the people around you might be in pain. This is why he forgives Rebecca in season one and why Nate revealing his sense of abandonment hurts Ted so deeply.
2. 2×12 – “Inverting the Pyramid of Success”
What has Ted brought to Richmond? The question is answered in large and small gestures throughout this episode, the most obvious of which is when Isaac puts his hand on the “Believe” poster, and everyone else follows suit. But elsewhere, Roy forgives Jamie and Nate for making passes at Keeley; Rebecca and Keeley’s friendship deepens even as Keeley is bound to leave — but it doesn’t work for Nate. He told himself a story about Ted abandoning him when this was never Ted’s intent, and Ted feels despair because Nate has closed himself off so intensely that he will ward off any attempt at reconciliation.
Key Moment: “Fútbol is life.” Dani takes the decisive penalty, and Richmond are promoted. The joy in the stands, the pub, and on the field feels real. The best sports dramas are the ones where you are not told to feel like you would for a real sports team’s victory — it’s the ones where you actually feel it.
1. 3×12 – “So Long, Farewell”
A series finale is under two obligations: first, credibly wrap up plotlines large and small on an artificial timeline so that they all happily coincide, and second, actualize the argument that the show has been building over however many seasons. “So Long, Farewell” succeeds on both fronts, pushing the team’s shared sense of ownership to the front of the story rather than their success or failure in the final match. Rebecca asking Ted to stay at Richmond on the terms of an ultimatum reveals her gratitude for the influence that he had there, but the episode’s final ten minutes make a crucial pivot away from the Lasso Way and toward the Richmond Way. The finale’s strongest element is that it contains absolutely no surprises — even the second-place finish is predictable — delivering on the well-sculpted ethic of both the story and the characters.
Key Moment: The coup de grâce is the conscious decoupling of leadership and ego via Ted’s edit to Trent’s book title. Ted’s Believe message has been living in the lockers and hearts of the Richmond players all along and will outlast his time in London, as well as his time on our screens.