A Ted Lasso Easter Egg Reveals Zava's Next Football Career Move
This post contains spoilers for the season 3 finale of "Ted Lasso."
"Ted Lasso" was adept at delivering the thrills of a sports drama, with the fall and rise of an underground English football team, while also telling a beautiful story about community, mental health, self-improvement, and being open about emotions.
After three seasons, "Ted Lasso" is seemingly, apparently, as far as we know, done and over. After two very strong seasons, the final season was a very mixed bag, with a lack of focus thanks to longer episodes that dragged on, a sermon-of-the-week format that seemed to take away from the joy of earlier seasons, and a misguided football story that was too obsessed with winning — until it wasn't.
This is (kind of) a football show, of course, meaning the characters' careers and stories carry on after the end of the finale. We know Ted Lasso's career at AFC Richmond is over, but what about the players? And crucially, what happened to superstar Zava (Maximilian Osinski), who seemingly retired halfway through the season? Well, the season 3 finale provided a sneaky answer, and it echoes real life.
Toward the end of the episode, we see Ted (Jason Sudeikis) head to the airport, and before he boards his flight back to Kansas City, he picks up a couple of magazines for the flight. On the magazine rack are some headlines that hint at the resolution to some storylines from the season, including the fate of Zava.
So long, farewell
Arguably the biggest reveal is the full cover story about Zava apparently coming out of retirement and traveling across the pond to play for the Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC). This, of course, mirrors real life, where Zlatan Ibrahimović (the real inspiration for Zava) transferred from Manchester United to LA Galaxy, where he played for a year.
The big difference is that Zava is apparently interested in Angelenos' love for avocado toast, presumably moving his business there. In real life, Zlatan famously and hilariously took out a full-page ad in the L.A. Times simply saying "Dear Los Angeles, You're welcome." Zava was one of the best parts of season 3, one of those beautiful "Ted Lasso" moments where the show has a bit of fun with the big personalities of football, so it's good to see Zava out there playing fantastic football.
Also visible on the cover of the magazine is a story about the Richmond goalkeeper Zorro (Moe Jeudy-Lamour), the player formerly known as Van Damme, formerly known as Zoreaux, who is set to star in a remake of "Escape to Victory" alongside actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. This sounds like a cool idea, as the original "Escape to Victory" famously starred the late iconic footballer Pelé in a cast that also included Michael Caine, Max von Sydow, and Sylvester Stallone. If you haven't seen it, the film is about an exhibition match of football between Allied war prisoners and their German jailers during World War II.
Other loose threads
Though only a brief mention, a headline covered by Ted's arm in the above screenshot also gives a shoutout to Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift), who finally gets the recognition he deserves for being a "quiet genius." While Isaac McAdoo (Kola Bokinni) is named in a piece near the top of the magazine alongside some of the biggest players today, like Erling Haaland and Lisandro Martínez.
That's sports, but there is more in the magazines next to it, like the latest issue of Beano being guest-edited by one Marcus Rashford, a real-life football player for England and Manchester United. Earlier in the season, we saw Ted reading one of Rashford's (real-life) children's books "The Breakfast Club Adventures" to Henry as a bedtime story, so it seems he has a promising career in literature.
In less exciting news, however, Entrepreneur magazine has a big profile on none other than Shandy (Ambreen Razia), who seemingly managed to launch her dating app "Starf*kr" and it is a big hit. There is also a headline referring to Keeley's ex Jack Danvers (Jodi Balfour), saying she is "no longer daddy's little girl," seemingly hinting that she matured and got out from under her father's influence. And in between all that, there's a mention of Verani Sports, the fictional kit manufacturer for Richmond before Nike took over in later seasons.
These are short, but cool little nods to characters that made the series special. Will we see any of this in a potential spin-off? Who knows, but it's good to know that the characters' lives carry on even after the end of "Ted Lasso."