When you think about football coaches, you probably picture a tough, no-nonsense, hardscrabble type of guy. Jim Harbaugh is a lifelong football guy, and he fits that mold to a tee. He’s often seen laying into refs or showing his passion for the game in heated sideline discussions with players and coaches. But he’s a lot more of a sweetheart than you might expect.
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He may seem like a hard-nosed coach from the outside, but if you talk to the guys he’s coached, you’ll find Harbaugh’s also a softie at times. He genuinely cares about his players beyond just football. Harbaugh is often described as approachable, which is a great quality for a coach.
That’s part of why he was one of the composite inspirations — along with former Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp and actor Jason Sudeikis’ old high school coach — for Sudeikis’ eponymous football coach-turned-soccer coach in the award-winning comedy series Ted Lasso. While appearing on Alex Smith’s podcast, Glue Guys, Harbaugh recently shared how much he loved the show during its three-season run from 2020 to 2023.
“I love it. I don’t know if they’ve ever made a better show. I mean, the little hairs on my arm stand up. That darts scene! Woah! When Jason [Sudeikis] is doing that, and that darts scene, and it just builds to it. ‘Be curious, not judgmental, so good,'” said the head coach.
That last bit is a direct quote from the Ted Lasso character on the show. And the darts scene Harbaugh mentioned is widely considered one of the best. Harbaugh, who’s entering his second season with the Los Angeles Chargers in 2025, also revealed that Sudeikis would occasionally call him to pick his brain on how to act, dress, and carry himself like a real football coach.
“We did talk. We had conversations. And he would ask about what I wore; he was kinda interested. I was definitely like, ‘Hey, you could do something like this, or you could do something like this, here’s something,'” Harbaugh revealed.
“But I mean that show, is so good, I mean, they knocked it completely out of the park. They hit it so far that you could run around the bases twice.”
Ted Lasso is a series about the eponymous coach, who goes from winning an NCAA football Division II title at Wichita State to becoming the manager of a fictional Premier League soccer club in London, Richmond AFC. The main character’s contagious positivity is the hallmark of the show. Lasso was portrayed as an affable and kind-hearted main character in an age of TV that is dominated by anti-heroes.
The first two seasons of Ted Lasso won tons of awards. Sudeikis won both the Emmy and the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Comedy Series for the first two seasons, and the show, as a whole, won Outstanding Comedy Series at the Emmys in 2021 and 2023.
Brett Goldstein and Hannah Waddingham, who play team captain Roy Kent and team owner Rebecca Welton, respectively, both won Supporting Actor Emmys for the first season, with Goldstein winning again for season 2. The third season, which received more mixed reviews, was billed as the final in the series.
However, it was announced in March that Ted Lasso had been renewed for a fourth season. Sudeikis hinted that it might see his Ted Lasso character coaching a women’s team this time around.
