Watch What They Cut

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 will 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?

I'm too excited by the new season to wait 'til the end to post about it. Sure, it means I won't understand the story arc they're on as I'm writing, but there are still lessons here, and they're already good. So... I'm starting.

Season four of Ted Lasso opens on good news that hides some pretty bad news. The good: Ted's going back to Richmond, to coach a brand new women's team. The bad: A different English club just folded its women's side, because it was "a well-intentioned but financial liability that was draining resources from the men's team."

The bad part is basically only mentioned once, but it hangs over the whole episode. Doesn't matter that it's a club Richmond hadn't played since before the show started.

The thing that matters is the decision, and what's not discussed. The club that folds doesn't say a thing about community in their statement. It cuts the thing that costs money and keeps the thing that makes money. That's the entire decision.

Real clubs don't let the quiet part stand alone like that. Check almost any club's website. You'll find a foundation or a trust. Port Vale's foundation says it exists to reach people from every part of its community. Stuart Pearce, who used to manage Man City, called clubs "the hubs of their communities," with connections running back generations. Wrexham's owners built their whole introduction to the club around it. When Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought in, their mission statement promised to make Wrexham AFC "a leading force for community good in the town."

Nearly every club says some version of this. “We belong here. We're in and of this place.” But saying it costs nothing. Few people check the math on press releases.

Clubs keep saying it because it pays. The claim buys loyalty, and loyalty turns into money later. Season tickets. A kid who grows up rooting for the club because his dad did. A few experiences as a youngster can lead to lifetimes of season tickets, concessions, and gear.

But anyone can say they belong to a community. For a team that's doing decently well, there's never really a cause to take account of whether it's true. It's only when money gets tight that truth gets tested.

That's the gap. What a club says to others about itself sits on one side, and what it protects when the budget shrinks sits on the other. We rarely get a community speech from the club that folds its women's side. We get the cut itself, and maybe a reason given for it.

Note: The show's framing isn't particularly realistic. Even half-competent communications teams are extremely unlikely to clearly say that women are draining resources from the men. Even if that's what they say in the boardroom, their message to the community will have words like 'regrettable' and 'restructuring for impact' and 'we continue to support the community we all love.' As an outsider who reads these sorts of messages on the regular, I see them as the same idea in different clothes. But it's the comms team's job to put the clothes on the idea before they push it out the door.

Whatever words they use, the act of shutting down a women's team says a lot about what the team's mission is. More than the mission itself, potentially.

You can't learn what an organization values by watching it on a good day. Everybody can look generous when nothing's at stake. You learn it by watching what gets cut first when things get tight. That first cut is the most honest act an institution ever takes. Put down the annual reports and letters to fans. Grab the layoff list. That's the unquestionable truth.

I've got a bunch of systems I've developed to see organizational and interpersonal structures, and they work pretty well in the real world. Most of the time they've worked well in Ted Lasso's fictional one, too.

What I see here is the oldest fracture there is: the space between what an organization says and what it does. Way back in the post about Nate, I wrote about how those gaps work. A club that says community and cuts community isn't failing to sense what's happening. It knows exactly what it's doing. The two halves of the organization just aren't telling the same story, and under budget pressure the doing half wins. The saying half is marketing. The doing half is the org chart and the bank balance.

An organization with real structural integrity in this sense knows the distance between what it claims and what it does, and it closes that distance or it drops the claim. The dishonest version keeps the claim and hopes nobody checks the facts. For the latter case, it's likely either hoping to make the claim true before the bill comes due, or to be gone with the funds before anyone notices.

Want to try it yourself? It's not hard. Name the thing that your organization says it values most. Then name the thing it cut last time money got tight. If the two don't match, believe the cut. It's the truth, every time.

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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