Note: We're headed for spoilers for the Season 2 finale of Ted Lasso in this article. If you haven't finished the season, you'll probably want to do so before reading further.

In the final episode of Ted Lasso Season 2, "Inverting the Pyramid of Success," the show drops a bombshell on its eponymous coach, fired by the likes of Nate (Nick Mohammed), one of Ted's first seeming successes. Over the show's past 12 episodes, animosity has been building in Nate. He tells Ted that, with the coach's attention elsewhere, Nate has felt unimportant. He says that he tried to regain Ted's interest, only to fail. From Nate's point of view, he's been left in shadow, abandoned, by someone he respected--and, clearly, needed.

Ted (Jason Sudeikis) barely has a chance to deal with that information before the end of the season, and in a quick time-skip scene at the end, we see that Nate has abandoned the AFC Richmond team to take a coaching job on the team owned by series antagonist Rupert Mannion (Anthony Head). It's something of an unprecedented moment in Ted Lasso, a show ostensibly about the strength and power of being nice (which, as Mason Downey notes, was never actually its best feature). Ted was nice to Nate, elevating him to a position of authority and providing him with friendship and mentorship. Nate repays that kindness by leaking the fact that Ted is suffering from panic attacks to the media, then leaving the team to coach a rival and work for someone whose actions have made worse the lives of people who Nate seemed to care about.