Ted Lasso Season 4 Shines a Spotlight on the Real Struggles Female Athletes Still Face

2 min readOver the course of three seasons, affable football coach Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) held firm to a seemingly impossible goal—transforming the beleaguered AFC Richmond into a team worthy of winning the Premier League. Now, for the Apple TV series’ long-awaited fourth season (premiering Aug. 5), Ted will take on an even bigger challenge—coaching a second-division women’s team. Because even though the ban on women’s football in the UK was lifted nearly 60 years ago, the disparities between the men’s and women’s league remain stark and formidable.“Women’s teams don’t have the following or the funding that men's teams do,” says Juno Temple, who plays AFC Richmond’s marketing manager Keeley Jones. “I think people can still be pretty scathing about it, which I really hope in this day and age genuinely starts to change because it's just so boring hating things and being pissed off about things that do not change your world in any way.”Michael BeckerRebecca (Waddingham) and Keeley (Temple) enjoy some retail therapy together.Viewers will see this reality play out—both on and off the pitch—as the new season unfolds and the team faces these issues head on, whether it be securing an adequate locker room or finding childcare for when mom laces up her cleats. Even management will be forced to examine their preconceived notions, like when owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) faces scrutiny from new assistant coach Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds).“The biggest thing for Rebecca, which I had to get my head around, was the fact that she thinks she's a feminist, but realizes that perhaps through her upbringing, she's not as much of a feminist as she thinks she is,” Waddingham tells WH. “I really enjoyed trying to navigate my way through that.”At stake isn’t just the success of AFC Richmond’s nascent women’s team but the profitability of the organization as a whole, including the men’s team, says Jeremy Swift, who plays operations manager Leslie Higgins.“Preparations have been going on for the last three years, and Leslie’s worry is the financial credibility of getting a women's team together for the first time at this club,” Swift says. “That's the challenge without diminishing the work that they've done for the men's team.”Overall, Waddingham describes the new season as having “scrappy edges,” and credits her new cast members’ keen abilities in bringing these plot points to life.“Our new actors haven't been afraid to be vulnerable,” she says. “I think the reason why our three-season arc worked so well is that every single character is three-dimensional... and that's what we have again. The first few episodes with our women's team, you see so many layers of their misgivings about themselves, their vulnerabilities, and they've just met us absolutely equally, very quickly.”Catch the new season of Ted Lasso on Apple TV starting Aug. 5.Amy Wilkinson is a contributing entertainment editor at Women's Health, where she edits the magazine's celebrity cover stories and writes health features. She has previously held editor titles at Entertainment Weekly and MTV News. In 2021, Amy completed her 600-hour teacher-training at Core Pilates NYC to become a comprehensively trained Pilates instructor.