‘Ted Lasso’ Season 4 Review: Women’s Football Brings a Fresh Angle, Not a Reinvention

By the end of its third season, Ted Lasso seemed well and truly finished. But that turned out not to be the case. After a longer-than-usual wait, the show has been granted one more chance—overtime, of sorts—a coda that follows a logical yet, given the seemingly definitive previous ending, somewhat unexpected turn. At the close of last season (spoilers for Season 3), Lasso had chosen to return home to Kansas City, missing his son and feeling guilty about not being present as he grew up. So, despite AFC Richmond’s on-field success, the affable coach left England and headed back to the United States.

The new season picks up a few years later, with Ted settled back home but working in a decidedly minor role: as an Associate Manager at a supermarket chain. He’s happy to be close to his son, yet clearly disengaged from his job and professional life. At just that moment, Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham), Richmond’s owner, shows up in Kansas City alongside the ever-anxious director of operations Leslie Higgins (Jeremy Swift) and the eccentric PR head Keeley Jones (Juno Temple). The pretext is a friendly visit, but their real aim is to persuade Ted to return—this time as the coach of the club’s newly formed women’s team. After some hesitation, and with his son now firmly in his corner, Lasso agrees to head back to Britain and take on a new challenge.

Season four unfolds in a different arena from the men’s game, shaped by the tensions of a team with little funding—the so-called Lady Greyhounds—largely ignored by both Richmond fans and the press, and beset by financial struggles, locker-room issues and internal rivalries. Roy (Brett Goldstein) returns as manager of the men’s side, though his role here is tied more to his complicated romance with Keeley than to anything happening on the pitch. Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt) is also back, assisting Ted as before. Together, they reassemble—give or take a few variations—the professional and personal chemistry that defined earlier seasons.

At the same time, a new group of characters is introduced, starting with Alice (Tanya Reynolds), an assistant coach whose dry, reserved demeanor makes her the opposite of Ted, along with a roster of players who, at least in the four episodes made available to critics, function more as a collective than as individually defined personalities. Their conflicts—of which there are many—drive much of the narrative. As in previous seasons, one of the show’s central concerns lies less in the sporting dimension than in the human side of its athletes; here, the football itself feels even more secondary.

Beyond these shifts—and what they imply, as the series attempts to place women’s football on equal footing with the men’s game, or at least to earn it recognition from media and fans—there are no major departures from the established formula. The characters, their personalities, relationships and humor still operate with familiar ease, and the series moves forward comfortably, if without generating much in the way of new expectations. Aside from the change of team and the comic (and occasionally less comic) situations that arise from it, the underlying logic remains largely intact. More than anything, this feels like a kind of “last dance”: a well-intentioned effort to spotlight women’s football and another opportunity to spend time with characters audiences have grown fond of—but not much more than that.