Ted BLAST-O: TV soccer Meets Soccer Blast

I remember when Al Wilson told me about the Ted Lasso series on Apple TV. I'll admit that I thought the premise was interesting: a folksy American football coach with no soccer expertise is recruited to coach a bottom-feeder team (AFC Richmond) in the English Premier League. Despite the appealing theme, since I'm generally not much of a TV-watcher, I was hesitant to commit to watching it. When I went to visit Al in Charlotte last fall, though, he dialed up the show on his living room TV and we sat and watched the first episode. And then the second. And then, the third. Yup, it's that good.

I got back to Denver and told my wife--who very much IS a TV-watcher--about the show. I sensed the same Luke-warmness from her as I had displayed toward Al. We watched the first episode. Then the second. By the third episode, she was hooked. It's no wonder the show's cleaned house at every TV awards show since it was released.

By now, most of the sports board game community has been turned on to Ted Lasso, so I'm not telling you anything new here. The show is now filming its third season, scheduled to debut later this summer. In the interim, many of us in the hobby have expressed an interest in taking Ted Lasso to the tabletop with a SOCCER BLAST rendition of AFC Richmond and its galaxy of stars--Sam Obisanya, Dani Rojas, the legendary Roy Kent, and everyone else. In the TV show, the first-season episodes are based in a fictional version of the 2019-20 EPL season. There are numerous action sequences, complete with British television play-by-play. Wouldn't it be fun to play out that season on the tabletop? Uh, let me think about that for a moment, YES!!

To that end, we've put together our own projection of what AFC Richmond would look like were it rendered as a SOCCER BLAST team. Of course, there are scant few statistics to work from in the TV show. Since the first season is based on the 2019-20 EPL season, and since AFC Richmond is fighting to avoid relegation in the final episode, I decided to use the real-life 18th place team from the 2019-20 EPL season--Bournemouth--as a baseline for rating AFC Richmond. I moved around some of the qualities and symbols from the Bournemouth cards so as to align with the Ted Lasso characters. All in all, I feel like these cards will do a pretty good job of approximating how the Greyhounds would perform on the pitch, if they were a real team.

But there IS a slight problem...

The short of it is, we're not legally allowed to use the TV show's player names on sports game cards in the same way we're allowed to use real athlete names on sports game cards. Why not? Well, without getting too deep into the legal weeds, Ted Lasso's AFC Richmond team is fictional, not real-life. The character names are the intellectual property of Jason Sudeikis, Bill Lawrence, Brendan Hunt, and Joe Kelly, the guys who created the show. Just as I would want my own intellectual property rights to be respected by others, so, too, I want to respect the product rights of Ted Lasso's creators.

The good news is, we can still enjoy some of the fun of experiencing AFC Richmond on our sports game tabletops, by using uniform numbers on our cards instead of player names. You'll have to transpose the numbers to the names, much like you would do while watching pro sports on TV. The AFC Richmond rosters can be found numerous places online, including here. Note that not all of the rostered players are carded for our set. There was little or no information on several players, not even a first name--I suspect they were included in a roster simply because their uniform made an appearance hanging on the wall in a locker room scene.

Alternatively, you can create your own names to go along with the uniform numbers and have a completely unique tabletop experience! To that end, I've added a couple of new Richmond player cards to the mix, which will make them a more competitive team. The added players are marked with gold uniform numbers (11, 26, 35) instead of blue.

A couple of final notes about these cards...

If you've watched the show, you know that the Jamie Tartt character is released from the Richmond team and returns to the team from which he was "loaned," Man City. In the final episode of season one, Tartt faces his former team with a notable result (which I won't reveal here, in case you haven't watched). We've created a Tartt card (#9) for both Richmond and Man City, so you can deploy him however you choose.

It may just be me, but it feels like in watching the TV version of this team, they played much better than their record would indicate. To that end, we will be using a “house rule” on our streamed game, giving every Richmond player the STAR quality, whether it’s on their card or not. This so-called “Cinderella Rule” is something I’ve applied before, I came up with it when making cards for the ‘91 Pittsburgh/Minnesota Stanley Cup hockey championship series, where a notably poor North Stars team somehow got hot in the playoffs.

Be sure to watch our 04.14.22 PLAAY Space YouTube stream, in which we'll see if Richmond can avoid relegation by defeating Man City or playing them to a draw.