What football team does Tracey Ullman support? The answer appears to be Arsenal, with the British-American actress and comedian recently described as a keen Gunners fan by Ted Lasso co-creator Brendan Hunt.
It is a football connection that has largely gone under the radar, perhaps because Ullman has spent so much of her career working in the United States.
However, her appearance in the fourth season of Ted Lasso has brought her interest in the game back into the spotlight, and apparently there was plenty of Arsenal talk going on when the cameras stopped rolling.
Tracey Ullman Supports Arsenal
Confirmation of Ullman’s Arsenal connection came from Brendan Hunt, who plays Coach Beard in Ted Lasso and is also one of the show’s writers and creators.
Speaking to People about Ullman joining the show, Hunt explained that she fitted in immediately with the cast and crew.
Football helped.
Hunt said Ullman “loves football” and “loves Arsenal”, adding that the pair were able to talk about the game regularly while working together.
Hunt is himself a committed Arsenal supporter, so he had found a useful ally on set.
His own support for the Gunners goes back to the 1990s. Hunt has previously explained that Dennis Bergkamp first caught his attention while he was living in Amsterdam. Reading Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch added to his interest before Nwankwo Kanu’s famous hat-trick against Chelsea in 1999 finally made Arsenal his team.
Ullman has not spoken publicly about Arsenal quite as often, so exactly when and why she started supporting the club is less clear.
What we do now know is that her interest in football is genuine rather than simply something picked up for a role.
Tracey Ullman Joins Ted Lasso
The timing of the revelation is particularly appropriate because Ullman has now joined one of television’s most famous football shows.
She made her first appearance in Ted Lasso Season 4 as Zelda Southport, an outspoken and highly successful businesswoman.
Zelda meets Rebecca Welton and Keeley Jones at a Women’s Football Business Summit and quickly makes an impression on both of them.
The character had originally been planned as someone younger, but the writers changed direction and decided that Rebecca and Keeley could benefit from meeting an older woman who had already built the sort of career and success they were aiming for.
Once that decision was made, Hunt said Ullman was the person they wanted for the part.
She duly joined the cast, making her debut in the fourth episode of Season 4, “Greyhounds’ Day Off”.
It means an actual Arsenal supporter is now appearing in a programme built around fictional Premier League club AFC Richmond.
Has Tracey Ullman Always Been Interested in Football?
Although the Arsenal detail has only recently received wider attention, there have been previous signs that football is part of Ullman’s life.
In 2019 she appeared on Jay Rayner’s Out To Lunch podcast, with the official episode description specifically listing “football with Jack Nicholson” among the subjects discussed during their conversation.
That is quite a combination.
There is considerably more information available about her acting, comedy and music career than there is about her football habits, so there is no long public record of her attending Arsenal matches or discussing the club every weekend.
Still, Hunt’s comments are unusually clear.
He worked directly with Ullman and describes her not simply as somebody who watches football occasionally but as someone who “loves Arsenal”.
For now, that is probably the best answer to the question of which club she follows.
Who Is Tracey Ullman?
Ullman was born in Slough in 1959 and began performing at a young age.
After winning a scholarship to the Italia Conti Academy, she worked as a dancer and actress before becoming well known on British television through programmes including Three of a Kind. She also enjoyed a successful spell as a pop singer in the early 1980s.
Her career changed significantly after she moved to the United States.
The Tracey Ullman Show began on the Fox network in 1987 and became a major success. It is also an important part of American television history for another reason.
Animated shorts featuring a rather unusual yellow family appeared during the programme.
Those characters were Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie Simpson.
The shorts eventually became The Simpsons, which developed into one of the longest-running programmes in television history.
Ullman went on to work extensively on both sides of the Atlantic, including her own comedy programmes and roles in films and television series.
More recently she appeared alongside Cillian Murphy in Steve before adding Ted Lasso to a remarkably long list of credits.
Arsenal Have Plenty of Famous Supporters
Ullman’s support puts her among a long list of actors, musicians and other famous figures who follow Arsenal.
The club’s London location and long history have helped it build a particularly large celebrity following, while its success during the Arsène Wenger years attracted fans well beyond North London.
Brendan Hunt is one of them, despite growing up in Chicago.
That makes the scenes behind the scenes on Ted Lasso rather amusing. AFC Richmond might be the club everyone is supposed to be concentrating on, but at least two members of the production were apparently finding plenty of time to discuss Arsenal.
So, Which Football Team Does Tracey Ullman Support?
All the available evidence points towards Arsenal.
Ullman herself has not made her football support a major part of her public image, and there is still very little information about when she became a fan or what first attracted her to the Gunners.
But Brendan Hunt’s recent comments provide a pretty clear answer. According to someone who spent plenty of time talking football with her on the Ted Lasso set, Tracey Ullman doesn’t just follow the game.
She loves Arsenal.
And after joining Ted Lasso, she has finally managed to combine two parts of her life that have rarely crossed over before: comedy and football.
