When Ted Lasso arrived in 2020, it did not come from nowhere. Jason Sudeikis had already played the character in a series of promos for NBC Sports’ coverage of Premier League matches, where the folksy coach began as a marketing mascot before becoming the lead of a half-hour series. What followed was a show released at the height of the COVID lockdowns and built around bad dads, ugly divorces, mental health in sports and the stubborn power of an optimistic outlook.
That is the frame behind ScreenRant’s new ranking of Ted Lasso’s 10 best characters. The list does more than sort fan favorites. It points to the reason the show landed so hard: the title character was the hook, but the ensemble carried the weight. Higgins, Rebecca’s right-hand man, earns his place because he delivers a monologue about accepting people for who they are instead of lamenting who they are not. Dani Rojas, whose motto was “Football is life,” became one of the series’ most memorable presences, then deepened after he went into a depressive spiral when he accidentally killed a dog on the pitch. He came out of that darkness with a sharper view: football is life, but it is also death.
The same pattern runs through the rest of the cast. Trent Crimm first arrived as a cynical journalist, then joined the main cast after he started working on a book about Ted’s influence on AFC Richmond. From there, he became an integral mentor to Colin as Colin came to terms with his sexuality. Keeley, by contrast, started as a vapid supermodel and the trophy girlfriend of a star football player, only to be narrowed in the third season into a pawn in a love triangle with Roy and Jamie. Brendan Hunt, meanwhile, was already a co-creator and writer on Ted Lasso before he joined the cast as Coach Beard, another sign that the series was designed around voices as much as plot.
That is why the ranking matters now. Ted Lasso was never just a joke about an American coach in London, and it was never sustained by one performance alone. Its lasting pull came from the way later seasons gave supporting characters room to break open, complicate themselves and matter on their own terms. The best characters list is, in effect, a reminder that the series endured because its world kept widening even after the premise had already worked.
If the question was whether Ted Lasso had enough depth to last beyond its warm first impression, the answer is already in the ensemble. The character who started as a promo became the center of a show, but the show that stayed with viewers was the one that kept handing the spotlight to Higgins, Dani, Trent, Keeley and Beard.
