Thierry Henry and Tony Parker were Ted Lasso fans first, Jason Sudeikis says
A second clip from Sudeikis's visit to All The Smoke, about two French sports greats who knew the coach before his show existed, has drawn far more than the channel's other uploads from the same podcast.
Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 74,076 views a day, 22 times a normal first day on this channel (3,358).
Ted Lasso Had Fans Before The Show?!
Jason Sudeikis is still doing the heavy lifting on DraftKings. As we reported here, his visit to All The Smoke had already produced a clip about never breaking character on Saturday Night Live. Now a second Short from the same conversation, "Ted Lasso Had Fans Before The Show?!", has passed 80,000 views in just over a day. The channel's Shorts usually end their first day at a few thousand.
The story he tells hosts Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson is a pleasant puzzle. Tony Parker and Thierry Henry, a basketball great and a football great, both told Sudeikis they were fans of Ted Lasso before the series had even been made. Sudeikis tells it as a joke on himself. Longtime soccer fans may already know the answer: the coach first appeared in short NBC Sports promos for its Premier League coverage, years before Apple TV+ turned him into a series.
The guests in the anecdote suit this couch. Parker won four NBA titles with the San Antonio Spurs, and Henry is Arsenal's record goalscorer and a World Cup winner with France. Jackson won the 2003 championship in San Antonio with Parker as his teammate, so perhaps the name landed with at least one host before the punchline did.
The same show has fed the channel plenty of other clips over the past day, with Cedric Ceballos remembering how hard it was to get Charles Barkley to practice and making a Hall of Fame case for Shawn Kemp. Those have drawn a few thousand views and a few hundred. The Sudeikis Short also collected likes many times faster than a usual DraftKings Short, though only two comments.
Published on Trari
- Channel
- DraftKings
- Subscribers
- 234,000 ▲ 1,000 this week
- Channel views, last 7 days
- 1,134,087
- Channel views, pace per day
- 202,785 (on a normal day: 114,974)
- Video published
- October 7, 2026
- Video views so far
- 82,796 (less than a day online)
- Video views, pace per day
- 79,879
The numbers
The figures show how far one Hollywood anecdote ran ahead of a sports channel's usual Shorts.
💡 Test your knowledge
Thierry Henry is the all-time leading goalscorer of which Premier League club?
Henry scored more goals for Arsenal than any other player in the club's history, most of them during his first spell from 1999 to 2007.



