How Ted Lasso ended up in ‘FIFA 23’ — and then racked up over 1 million wins

Ted Lasso has won more than 1 million soccer matches.

Not the flesh-and-blood fictional soccer manager from the hit Apple TV+ sports comedy series “Ted Lasso,” played by Jason Sudeikis, but the digital avatar of the AFC Richmond gaffer that can be played in career mode in “FIFA 23,” which launched in September.

Players have opted to use the character, who is included for the first time in this year’s edition of the best-selling soccer video game as part of a collaboration with the Emmy-winning show, enough to have won more than a million games with him, per “FIFA 23” publisher Electronic Arts.

Those victories are by some of the record 10.3 million users who bought and played the game in the first week after its Sept. 30 public debut, the company said.

Also in the game is Lasso’s fictional AFC Richmond club and its Nelson Road stadium (in the “Rest of World” clubs section), along with unlockable content from the show and other characters from the series, including players Roy Kent, Jamie Tartt, Dani Rojas, Sam Obisanya, and Isaac McAdoo.

Ted Lasso himself, of course, is the headliner. So how and why did Electronic Arts end up putting the character and his team in the game?

Obviously, the soccer connection made sense immediately, but making the collaboration work required negotiations and technology efforts. That can often be a complicated and slow process, but it was at least slightly expedited thanks to both sides being keen to get it done.

“We’re often fans of each other’s work,” said Cam Weber, executive vice president and group general manager at EA Sports, in a recent call with The Athletic. “It became clear actors in the show were fans and play FIFA. There was definitely a passion on both sides that made both groups want to work together.”

The idea to include the show’s characters and content in a FIFA game began with the goal of putting it into “FIFA 22.” It took longer to physically make it happen because Electronic Arts has production and development cycles for how it builds games, and specific windows in pre-production of what will be built into titles like FIFA each year, Weber said. So, Ted Lasso had to wait until that content could be integrated into the game.

Once the timing was right it wasn’t an especially onerous project to integrate the TV show into the video game.

“It’s content that we are used to building — adding stadiums, teams, kits,” Weber said. “It’s work we do all the time.”

On the lawyerly side, EA had to work out deals with Apple TV, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment, and the “Ted Lasso” acting talent. Nothing has been disclosed about the agreements.

FIFA producers and developers traveled to London to conduct face scans on the “Ted Lasso” set, working around the cast’s production schedule.

The actor’s voices are not included. So no Roy Kent profanity in the “E”-rated game.

A message was left for Sudeikis, who rose to fame through his “Saturday Night Live” tenure and subsequent movie and TV roles, through his management.

“He’s a huge fan of the game and was a delight to work with,” Weber said.

Sudeikis did offer a statement via Electronic Arts when the “FIFA 23” deal was announced: “I am truly fortunate, and deeply grateful, to have had many special moments in my career thus far, and I consider this experience among the best of them, As longtime fans of EA Sports’ “FIFA,” having Ted Lasso and the whole AFC Richmond squad incorporated into the newest version of the game is truly a dream come true for myself and the rest of the fellas.”

Tactics like the “Ted Lasso” collaboration make sense for EA to keep the franchise fresh as it enters its fourth decade amid a major change: This year’s game will be the last to use the FIFA name in the title before switching to “EA Sports FC” next year because of a licensing dispute.

EA has published FIFA games since 1993 and reportedly generated more than $20 billion in sales to make it one of the most successful video games of all time, and the most-sold sports game ever. It’s estimated 150 million-plus people play the game across more than 200 countries.

How has it performed so far? In addition to the game’s 10.3 million first-week users — the best-ever for any FIFA game, the company said — its first 23 days on the market saw 15.7 billion minutes spent playing 1.7 billion games with 4.3 billion goals so far, EA said.

“We’ve had an amazing launch and super strong engagement,” Weber said.

Mat Piscatella, the top video game industry analyst at The NPD Group, isn’t sure what sort of sales or play impact “Ted Lasso” is having on “FIFA 23” because there’s no granular data or research available.

“It sure seems like a great tie-in with plenty of relevance, but there’s really no way for me to make any kind of estimate as to what it meant to the title overall,” he said. “It is off to a great start, as are many of the other big games releasing right now (it doesn’t hurt that the competitive window for games is pretty light this year) — but it’s too early to really tell anything else.”

Will Ted Lasso and the rest of the characters return in future editions of EA’s soccer franchise?

That decision hasn’t yet been made, the company said.

For now, the fictional content is generally well met by fans and critics.

Andrew Webster at The Verge wrote positively about playing the “Ted Lasso” content, going as far as to put AFC Richmond in Major League Soccer and dominating the American top-flight clubs. His lone complaint was lack of dialogue limits how much the show’s spirit makes it into the game.

“The game does a great job at accurately recreating the looks of actors like Phil Dunster, Toheeb Jimoh, Kola Bokinni, and Cristo Fernández so that they look largely like they do on the show. I mean, just look at that virtual recreation of Jason Sudeikis’ mustache,” he wrote.

Others have been more critical while echoing that sentiment.

“Just as superheroes are fun because of their powers, not their costumes, ‘Ted Lasso’ is great because of its characters’ personalities, not their names,” Luke Saward wrote at Screenrant.com, noting that the inclusion of fictional grounds meant some real stadiums are absent.

The game includes 19,000 players, 700 teams, 100 stadiums and 30 leagues. This year’s edition also includes the top divisions of women’s soccer in England (Barclays Women’s Super League) and France (Division 1 Arkema).

The upcoming men’s and women’s FIFA World Cup tournaments will be part of the game as upcoming free downloadable content. The game is played on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, PS4, and Xbox One.

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For the uninitiated, Ted Lasso (originally an NBC Sports promo character) is a charming, folksy American Division II college football coach hired in the show by the new owner of a fictional Premier League soccer club to spite her philandering ex-husband, the former team owner, because Lasso has zero knowledge of the game, and she assumes his incompetence will wreck the club. Instead, Lasso proves endearing — and the show quickly became a streaming hit and critically acclaimed.

It premiered on Apple TV+ in 2020 and had a second season last year. A third has been ordered and is in production.

The inclusion of “Ted Lasso” characters within the game is part of Electronic Arts’ wider strategy of melding pop culture and entertainment partnerships with its library of video games as it seeks to grow users and build on fiscal 2022’s $7.5 billion in revenue.

“We very much see EA Sports at the center of sports culture and fandom,” Weber said. “We’ve been looking for more opportunities to expand our reach into pop culture, sports culture and entertainment.”

With Nickelodeon, EA’s “Madden” NFL football franchise will be central to a forthcoming Paramount+ comedy movie called “Fantasy Football” in which the daughter of a player discovers she can control him on the field using the “Madden NFL 23” game. It premieres Nov. 25.

With Marvel Entertainment, Electronic Arts has been putting star players in superhero outfits as part of the FIFA Ultimate Team mode in the new soccer game.

Electronic Arts plans to explore more sports-entertainment video game collaborations in the future but isn’t revealing details yet.

“You’re going to see a lot more of this in the future,” Weber said.

(Screenshot of Ted Lasso from “FIFA 23”: Courtesy of EA Sports)