Neurodivergent (Headcanon) Alley: Coach Beard (Ted Lasso)

It’s been a while since I’ve done a Ted Lasso Neurodivergent Alley post—which is kind of wild, since there are so many characters on that show who feel ND as all get-out. But Wicked took over my brain, so I very much had to write about that, and then a couple other characters jumped out at me and I wanted to circle back to another while it was still fresh in my mind. But I certainly haven’t forgotten about Ted Lasso, so it’s high time I worked some more of these characters back into the rotation. Today, we’re looking at the one and only Coach Beard.

As I’ve said before, it took some thinking before I saw Ted Lasso through a neurodivergent lens, and none of the characters necessarily pinged for me at the start. But if they had, Beard would’ve been a solid starting point (along with Trent and Barbara—more on them on some future date.) Ted’s good friend, right hand man, and personality foil, a few things jump out about Beard pretty quickly.

First, he’s very even-keeled on the whole. Beard’s vocal and facial affect are both fairly flat, and even when he gets angry, he tends to yell in an even tone. When he is expressive, though, he dials it all the way up to eleven and legitimately shrieks. He’s just as likely not to make eye contact as he is to stare too intently.

Beard is frequently shown reading, especially in the coaches’ office. While Ted comes to AFC Richmond with more of a hearts-and-minds focus to his coaching, Beard is the one who begins hardcore-downloading football knowledge, immersing himself in studying the game. He doesn’t have the players’ skill or Nate’s intuition for strategy, but he knows a lot more about football than Ted and sometimes corrects his misinformed statements. But it’s not just football. Beard is a fount of random knowledge he’s acquired about various topics and will gladly give a short infodump or spout a quick fact whenever it’s relevant. (Also, he has a tumultuous on-again-off-again relationship with a woman he met playing chess, and the first time they break up, it’s because Beard is prioritizing the game over her.)

Beard is often a quiet observer. He’s part of a large social group, but he frequently stays more on the periphery of it. His life is peppered by bizarre adventures—we get a glimpse of one in the Beard-centric “Beard After Hours” episode, but we’re more likely to get absurd references or offhand sight gags that only hint at whatever he got up to. He’s into drugs and mind-altering experiences, and to many of the characters, there’s an air of mystery about him. On a rare occurrence when he and Jamie are alone in the coaches’ office together, Jamie confesses, “I don’t really know how to talk to you,” and Beard replies, “Then it’s working.”

Finally, Beard and Ted are wildly different from one another, and yet they operate on a remarkably similar wavelength. Despite their differences in temperament and how they present themselves to the world, their friendship is knit together with their rituals, wordplay games, and support for one another. Beard follows Ted across the ocean to help coach a sport neither of them have experience with—there’s very little one wouldn’t do for the other, and even though they wouldn’t necessarily look like natural friends on paper, it’s obvious when you see them together. It’s sort of a platonic version of Roy and Keeley, two other neurodivergent-coded characters who fit wonderfully well together even though it feels like they shouldn’t. And that’s something that feels very autistic to me: two autistics with very different traits who nonetheless recognize how they both resonate on the same frequency.

I really love this Twitter post that most autistic folks can be sorted into either Ted Lasso Autism, Roy Kent Autism, or Coach Beard Autism. The poster, @positr0nic, further explained their theory like this:

“Ted likes being perceived, and really cares about being perceived positively […] Beard does not give a shit whether he is being perceived or not, nor does he give a shit about if it’s positive or negative […] Roy is sensitive to being perceived and generally doesn’t like being perceived.”

That’s honestly a great description, and while not every autistic person presents just like Ted, Roy, or Beard, I think that metric would still hold true. Even though I do think I have elements of both Ted and Beard in me, by that scale I would be more of a Roy Kent autistic. Really interesting to think about!