The Goals That Were Never Load-Bearing

What happens to an organization the moment its strongest personality walks out the door? This series, Lessons From a Fictional Football Club, turns to Ted Lasso as an unlikely case study, treating it as a structural experiment in what actually holds an organization together under pressure, versus what was just one person's charisma wearing a disguise. Across this series, I'll pull leadership lessons from specific scenes, ground them in research where it exists, and close with structural reads through the Loadmap framework, all in service of one question worth asking about your own team: when you leave the room, what keeps running?

The Lasso posts continue.

For about half of its third season, Ted Lasso shows you a team winning, and if you only watch the scoreboard you’ll think the team is getting pretty damn good. A global superstar signs with the underdog club, the kind of name that sells shirts in countries that didn’t know the team even existed. He scores, and the team wins, and wins again... and again. The whole club feels different. The show lets you enjoy the winning, but the winning is what makes the problem hard to see.

Watch the team instead of the standings, though, and the problem is unmissable. The players used to work together because they had to, since none of them could win a match alone. Once the star arrived the teamwork wasn’t needed. They gave the ball to the star and let him score. The young forward (Tart) who spent two seasons becoming a real player stopped improving, because the team no longer needed him. 

Inevitably, the star leaves. The team that appeared unstoppable  doesn’t just stop scoring. It’s worse than it was before the star got there. The players had been scrappy before. Now they’ve spent months getting more dependent on the star and worse at playing without him, and they pay for it the moment the star is gone.

I think most leaders get this backwards. The decline doesn’t start when the star leaves. It starts the day the team centers itself around a person. A team built around one player doesn’t get stronger while it wins. It gets more brittle, one win at a time, and the scoreboard hides it, because a winning team looks like a strong one.

Call it what you want. Reversion. Regression. Snap-back. A team plays above its real level for as long as something holds the level up, and then it drops back the moment that support is gone, because nothing underneath ever improved. 

There’s a fair objection here, and I’ve made the mistake it describes. Sometimes the star really is worth building around. Staking a club or a company on one great player is a common strategy, and the show doesn’t pretend the wins were fake. The league position improved. The fans were legitimately happy. Signing the star made sense. But reading his wins as proof of a good team is where things went off the rails. It’s a hard mistake to catch in the moment, because today’s wins seem more important than tomorrow’s losses and backsliding.

So building a team around one star is brittle and failure-prone by design, not by bad luck. A star is temporary. Stars transfer, retire, burn out, or leave for an avocado farm, so the club that rests its results on them is running on a clock it can’t see. The problem shows up while the star is still there. Every team skill the star replaces just rots on the vine. By the time the star is gone, the team has spent months destroying the crop it will depend on.

Figuring out an exercise you can try for this is tricky. You need to figure out if you have a star of your own, and if you do, run this before they leave. Take the person your results most depend on, the one who keeps winning the matches. I don’t want you to ask them what will happen if they leave. Ask them what it was that the team stopped doing because the star does it so well. Make an actual list. Those things are the cost you’re already paying while everything looks awesome. If it’s a short or simple list, you may be okay. If it’s long and consequential, you don’t have a star, you’ve got a dependency that happens to win matches or make you money - for now. 

When I look at this through the framework I’ve been building, the wins told the club almost nothing true about itself. The only question worth asking after the collapse was what would have made the team good without a star to hide behind, so the next great player who arrives adds to a team that already works instead of hobbling one that doesn’t. The show spends its last episodes answering that, and so will the next several posts. 

Build a team solely around a star and you get two things: the matches the star wins, and the slow loss of everything the team could do without him. If the goal is short term wins at the cost of your future, it makes sense. If the goal is long term success, this isn’t the right strategy for you.

So: who’s winning the matches for you right now, and what has everyone else stopped learning because of it? How are things looking short- and long-term?

Lessons from a Fictional Football Club is a series of unofficial analysis and commentary. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Apple, Warner Bros., or anyone connected with the television series Ted Lasso. Loadmap is the framework I think with in these posts. Loadmap, by Tate Linden, is offered exclusively by Stokefire.

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