The Problem With “Ted Lasso’s” Akufo is Him Being the Spear of Capitalism

The show gives an example of moral capitalism — while making sure its Black character shows its dark side.

Ted Lasso’s humor and joy live in its wordplay.

Toward the end of its third and final season, Lasso and AFC Richmond owner have a brief exchange. The team is gearing up for another game. Ted and Rebecca are in the coach’s room, exchanging banter.

“I’ve got to see a man about a horse,” Rebecca muses.

Ted, who has also struggled to communicate with the British with idioms and American references (he left his team flabbergasted earlier in the season with a story about supporting someone he knew was in the closet by not attending a Super Bowl viewing with the Denver Broncos), finally thought he found a linguistic similarity between the mother country and its progeny that became the most powerful nation in known existence.

“No,” Rebecca replied. “I actually am going to buy a horse.”

Akufo is an assegai. Rebecca is a pensive.

Many critics have lashed out against the third season of Ted Lasso, accusing it of losing the focus on its titular character in favor of side characters and setting up spin-offs that Tim Cook could greenlight. But Cook, above all, is a capitalist who quietly and fervently believes that his company, the most profitable in the world, is a positive good for the world. If its laptops and phones can better interconnect folks and help them unleash their personal creativity, its top-ranked and Emmy-award winning flagship show must surely do the same to justify its existence. It is this ethos that drives the narrative decisions of the third season and its attitudes toward Black personhood.

Four Black characters — none American, but all written with an American lens — receive narrative focus.

Zoreux/Van Damme, Zorro receives the least narrative focus. The arrival of iterant superstar Zava inspires him to change his birth name to the one he really wanted, named after a white action movie star from the 90s. Later, after teammate Dani Rojas breaks his nose and he does a clear protective mask, Rojas gifts him a black one. The French Zoreux then becomes the Spanish Zorro.

Isaac, the team’s captain, becomes the focus of the team’s acceptance of Will’s homosexuality. In a #metoo response to Keely’s sex tape leaking, the team decides to delete all evidence of their partners from their phones. Will hesitates; he does not have liaisons but is in a committed and secret relationship with his partner. Isaac gets frustrated with Will’s slowness and snatches his phone to do the deed himself. After looking at Will’s pictures, he seemingly goes catatonic. In that episode’s game, Issac runs off the pitch to confront a fan for calling the team the F-word. And at the end, Issac goes to Will’s house, hurt that he did not trust his captain with his sexuality.

Sam’s story begins with him tending to Ola’s and it ending with a capitalist from the Continent threatening his small dream of commerce. After posting against the British PM’s anti-refugee policy on Twitter, some nativists vandalize his restaurant. He gets frustrated and has to be reminded by his father not “to fight back, but fight forward.” But in what way could Sam “fight back” against the mystery vandals? More angry posts on Twitter? AFC Richmond gathers around Sam and help him repair the damage done by white supremacy.

Later in the season, Ghanaian billionaire Edwin Akufo returns. In the second season, Sam turned down his offer to join a new African soccer team the billionaire was forming. Akufo returned to exact the capitalist’s revenge. While many members of AFC Richmond got to represent their nations in the national games, Akufo made sure Nigeria orphaned Sam by paying them $20 million in a bribe. He went to Ola’s after buying out the restaurant’s entire evening. He bribed a food critic into writing that he found a piece of glass in his food. He then let Sam know he was opening up a competing African restaurant on the same block — one that would also serve Chicago hot dogs.

Akufo would assault billionaire white men with those hot dogs later in that episode. His real reason for leaving the Continent and going to one of its colonial metropoles was to convince the white owners of high-performing soccer teams to form an elite league of their own. The level of exclusivity would allow them to charge higher prices than the Premier or more competitive Champion’s League. Akufo and the other white men in the room start salivating. Rebecca, the only white woman in the room and one who had fully grown into her business acumen, had none of it. Visualizing the males as children, she chastises them for their greed. She reminds her leech of an ex-husband Rupert that he used to sneak into AFC Richmond games back when he was poor. Her vitriol was directed toward all in what is Ted Lasso’s thematic context — virtuous capitalism from the 1% and their scions.

Akufo proceeded to act out the subtext. The billionaire from the Dark Continent threw a toddler’s tantrum and covered the white people in African food and Polish sausage. After my wife and I laughed at the scene of the white 1% cleaning themselves up, we remarked on the transgressive nature of that scene. A food fight is still a fight. Akufo assaulted those white men and that white woman for rejecting his dream and was allowed to walk away. We would expect such impunity from white people extending grace toward white people. But not toward a Black man.

I wrote a previous article about the racial subtext of the show called “The Problem With ‘Ted Lasso’s’ Sam Is That He Allows Silence Toward Racism.” In observing the race dynamics of the second season, I wrote, “White people generally do not write about Black intimacies well.” The second season included subtle winks at Black personhood via the jollof wars and Adoo’s haircut scene. Those intimacies vanish in the final season.

If all Black violence is political, then the emotion that nurtures that behavior also must be. White supremacy believes violence primarily springs from misunderstanding. A clash of folkways. It emerges from a lack of resources and your target’s abundance. It comes from your emotional insecurity and the fortress your foe has built around his ego. Hatred, and its scion, violence, has an inner life girded by intimacy.

Black intimacies are more about how we talk and love up on each other. Hate, the interpersonal kind that motivates grudges and man-on-man violence, is also an intimacy. Akufo, in season two, made his hate of Sam intimate by calling him Yourba trash. He did it again by review-bombing his restaurant and opening a competitor down the block. One could argue that his rage toward Rebecca and the white billionaires was not interpersonal. But that betrays a cursory understanding of capitalism. Akufo is a Black billionaire, which means his skin color prevents him from ever being accepted as a member of the one percent. Yet he has much more in common with the white men who he sells over Chicago hot dogs an exclusive soccer league to then Sam, a Black man made rich not from owning capital, but from the sweat of his brow and his engaging in local commerce. What to make of Akufo’s absence of intimacy in the hate and violence Akufo shows those white men and Rebecca, who have at least enough regard for him to heed his invitation and tolerate his eccentric palate? Blackness demands he knows Sam intimately enough to hurt him. But his fortune — the wearing of DuBois’ mask that necessitated the erection of his wealth — also demands similar intimacy toward those white men. He shows none.

If its laptops and phones can better interconnect folks and help them unleash their personal creativity, its top-ranked and Emmy-award winning flagship show must surely do the same to justify its existence. It is this ethos that drives the narrative decisions of the third season and its attitudes toward Black personhood.

And the absence of intimacy in Akufo’s violence stands in contrast to Rebecca’s moral capitalism. Menace is Akufo’s inheritance, imbued with none of the wordy, Western charms that caused the show to stack up Emmys across its three seasons. He is an assegai. He strikes white men and can never be truly at home in their billionaire boys club despite earning admittance. Rebecca is the pensive that reminds those men of their higher selves, of who they were when they were lower on the economic totem pole before they became the scion of the world’s sport — and most of the world is poor because of men like them. Soccer is for the world’s poor, like basketball is for Black folk in America. Rebecca, with her humor and the show’s attention to wordplay, tells its millions of views that truth.

What it would mean if a Black man was able to articulate that truth over attacking it? Would white people listen?