The Ted Lasso Relationship Guide: Nate's Locker Room Speech

Was Nate Shelley ever a good guy or has he always been bad?

It’s time to talk about Nate. In a show filled with people who change for the better because of their relationship with Ted and one another, he is the one character who changes for the worse over the first two seasons. Or more accurately, he’s the one character who doesn’t really change at all, he is just given more power, which makes his faults all the more prominent. But to talk about Nate, I think we have to start with one of the most defining moments for him in season one, which is the locker room speech in episode 7 (Make Rebecca Great Again).

The team is headed to Liverpool, where they have not won in decades. Despite the way the team is coming together, no one on the team believes they can win. Ted asks Nate what he would say to motivate them, and Nate refuses to tell him because, “You won’t like my idea and it makes you hate me.Then you fire me. Then I have to move back in with my parents and they’ll be ashamed of me. Then everyone finds out back home and laughs at me until my face melts off.” 

Later he goes to Ted’s room and gives him his ideas, but the timing is such that Ted is upset and chews him out. The next day, Ted apologizes and tells Nate that only he can deliver these ideas to the team. So Nate roasts everyone on the team as a means to motivate them. It works and the team wins the game, bringing them closer to safety from relegation. Watch the speech below.

This moment was heralded by basically everyone (me included) as a great moment of Nate stepping into his confidence. And there is an element of that here. Shortly after this, Nate is promoted to the coaching staff and he drives much of the winning that happens in season 2. 

This is also one of the first times that we see just how mean and cutting Nate can be, particularly to the players who bullied him in the early episodes. While most of his quips had advice that could actually help the players in the game, his comments toward Isaac and Colin are just cruel. He doesn’t offer them a way to improve, he just exposes what they did wrong.

I often wonder what Nate wrote on the sheet that he gives to Ted. I don’t think Ted would agree to telling someone that they play “like a big, dumb pussy.” Telling Isaac that he needs to be more aggressive seems like something Ted would agree to, but name calling doesn’t really feel like a Ted Lasso kind of move.

In his book “Sacred Hoops,” legendary Bulls coach, Phil Jackson writes about anger as a motivation in sports. When talking about playing the Detroit Pistons, he writes, “Anger was the restless demon that seized the group mind and kept the players from being fully awake. Whenever we went to Detroit, the unity and awareness we’d worked so hard to build collapsed, and the players reverted to their most primitive instincts…Win or die was the code; rousing the players' anger and bloodlust was the method. But that kind of approach, though it often gets the players’ juices flowing, interferes with concentration and ultimately backfires. It also stinks as a blueprint for competition.” 

While this kind of anger stirring can be effective in the moment, its long-term efficacy tends to wane. We see it all the time. People who use their power to bully and humiliate frequently have levels of success. But often, especially now when the line between a public and private life is blurred due to the prevalence of social media, we often see those who use those tactics brought low by them. We see it in politics, in entertainment, in faith communities. Yes, there is success, but it is not without the risk of that being stripped away when people wise up to the tactics.

What is interesting is that we see what drives Nate just a few scenes earlier. Nate’s decisions are motivated by fear. He is constantly worried about how he appears to everyone else. And this is not without some merit. We see early in the season that he is the whipping boy for Jamie, Isaac, and Colin. In season 2, we get more interactions between Nate and his father, and in those, we see a man who never encourages his son, even when he is having a moment in the sun. Most of what sets him off in the second season is any mention of his verbal slip where he said “wonder kid” instead of “wunderkind.” Calling attention to that immediately results in anger.

The fear he has about how people perceive him combined with the lack of encouragement he receives from his father, create a scenario where Nate’s default mode for coaching is one of barbarism. And as the only life that he cares about is increasingly on the field, that cruelty begins to spill over into his personal life, culminating in the season 2 finale where he confronts Ted in the most hurtful way and then leaves Richmond to coach West Ham United for Rupert. 

I don’t know if we’re going to get a redemption arc for Nate this season. As I mentioned last week, music plays a big part of the show, and “You can’t always get what you want” in the trailer has me thinking a lot about what this final season might hold.

 But what do you think? Was Nate a good guy who went bad or was Nate a bad guy who got power and went worse? And is he going to come around in season 3 or is he lost? Let me know your thoughts!