Now the season can kick off.

If last week’s premiere of Ted Lasso Season 4 was throat-clearing to get our characters back on the same page, the real action starts in Episode 2, which, frankly, feels a bit too familiar. 

First, we have Ted (series co-creator/showrunner Jason Sudeikis) waking up in his new London digs, which just so happen to be above the neighborhood pub he frequented in the old days. We get a callback to the Wheatabix joke from Season 1, only this time, they’re tiny, like the American version. 

On goes the blue v-neck sweater over the collared shirt, strapped in goes the backpack, and off Ted strolls through Richmond like it was 2021. The old Richmond supporter who used to flip him off every day even makes a cameo. 

This walk down memory lane is capped by a reunion in Rebecca’s office, only it’s barbecue that Ted delivers in the small pink box. (Brisket With The Boss!) Rebecca has apparently become obsessed since her Kansas City sojourn. 

But wait, a crisis is afoot! The current Lady Greyhounds coach, one Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds), has resigned due to Rebecca passing her over for the big job. She has Beard’s terse aloofness, Roy’s gruff, zero-fucks-givenness, and a whiff of Nate’s deeply rooted insecurities. She’s a Richmond natural. 

Not for much longer, as she and Ted will only work together for a week and then she’s gone. Meanwhile, Rebecca spins out after Alice, upon discovery that Rebecca never even considered a woman for head coach, declares Rebecca to be anti-feminist. How dare such a whelp like Alice accuse her of not respecting and supporting women? But just to be sure, she orders a slew of books by bell hooks, like a good white feminist must. She also takes Ted’s advice that she should hire a woman for the assistant coach gig. (Things between Ted and Beard are, shall we say, complicated thanks to Beard’s Beardness.)

Ted’s eyes slowly open to all of the disadvantages that women players face. He’s super impressed with Alice’s dossier on the whole squad, but she also shows him the women’s locker room (a glorified closet with only one shower that they have to share with the youth academy players). These players have not been properly considered on the same level as their male counterparts. 

Ted’s first press conference is Exhibit B. The press room seems suspiciously full for a second-division women’s team. The questions reveal reporters’ real reasons for being there: How will the men fare this season? What do you make of Jamie Tartt transferring to Barcelona? Can Richmond get back to the Champions League? None are actually about the women’s team. 

Ted continues his education in all the ways women’s footballers are treated as second-class citizens. It’s not just the locker room or the men-focused journalists; it’s also the three Richmond supporters from the old days who joke about how slow and boring the women’s game is. It’s Ted’s longing gaze at his former office (now occupied by Roy), paired with his surprise at the sparse, cinder-blocked space of the women’s coach’s office. 

Beard caps these revelations by citing “lack of resources, underwhelming media coverage…the only people in it are truly in it for the love of the game.” When Ted says coaching a women’s team is like coaching college again, Beard delivers the hammer blow: “Not really. Those guys get paid more.”

Arsenal and England national team captain Leah Williamson consulted on this season, and you can tell that someone with an inside perspective gave notes. The team’s star striker tears an ACL in one of her knees during training, and Alice remarks to Ted that she’s “seen [her] fair share” of such injuries. You could pass that off as the general sorrow one might feel for any athlete in such a circumstance. Here, that sorrow is even heavier, as women’s players are 4-5 times more likely than men to tear an ACL. Williamson would know. She blew an ACL two months before the 2023 Women’s World Cup, the biggest event in women’s soccer. She missed the tournament as a result, a tournament in which England finished runner-up, playing the final in front of almost 76,000 people.

Williamson’s guidance also provides some levity, as the team is ecstatic to find unlimited tampons available in the newly renovated women’s locker room. Ditto Ted’s response to a moment of romantic affection between two players. “You don’t get a lot of that in men’s football,” he observes. “Not that you know of,” Alice retorts. Only someone who has lived the life of a women’s athlete would be able to provide the specificity of detail that makes those jokes hit.

That terseness from Alice may be her defining trait. “Most people think she’s rude as shit,” Roy informs Ted. “I think she’s hilarious.” That terseness would suggest that she has as much to learn from Ted as Ted does from her. She has the stats prepped, but can’t understand why he would want to know what the players are like as people. We of course know better. We’ve seen Ted’s Magical Coach-Dad act too many times to miss where this is heading. The capstone is Ted’s aw-shucks demand that Alice stay on as assistant coach. Ted won’t take no for an answer. 

Such a clash of footballing reality with Ted Lasso’s fantastical positivity could grate in its first three seasons, but this episode widens the gulf. The series admirably refuses to ignore the truths about women’s football, but if Sudeikis, new co-showrunner Jack Burditt, and the writing staff want to shine a light on those issues, it only makes the absurdity of their sports-movie Lassoisms all the more glaring. 

I offer Richmond keeper Katie “Boots” Quinn (Jude Mack) as evidence. Boots plays without gloves. She romantically embraces the risk of pain: “The sting is everything, innit. What’s the point in life if you’re not feeling it all?” Never mind that Mack may have feared feeling too much, recently admitting that she couldn’t actually save a shot without gloves during filming. 

“Feeling it all” is a very Ted Lasso theme, and a very Ted Lasso storytelling shortcut to illustrate Boots’s eccentricities. The problem is, she’s making herself worse as a keeper. Gloves do protect keepers from the sting of a well-struck shot, but they also have high-friction palms to help a player grip the ball better. Tough fingertip saves are more possible thanks to the gloves’ extra half-inch of length on each finger. No wonder “the big clubs won’t touch her”: she’d probably cost her team more than a few goals each season! 

Such an approach to her career would also affect her potential income. A second-division women’s footballer can’t afford to lose a single pound sterling if she can avoid it. Sudeikis and Burditt unwittingly suggest that Boots is doing exactly that, and unproblematically so. Boots tries to undercut the romance by listing increasingly ridiculous examples of her philosophy, from not using novocaine at the dentist to swallowing earplugs at a concert (and asking Ted if he prefers sex with or without a condom), but those bits don’t deflate the sincerity of her desire to feel it all.

Ted Lasso has never cared much for the realities of life as a football player or coach in England. This season presents a potentially insurmountable obstacle to that storytelling approach. If the show wants the audience to take the actual struggles of women’s footballers seriously, then the moments when they pivot to “BELIEVE” vibes serve to cheapen those real-life struggles. We have eight more weeks to discover where Sudeikis, Burditt and the rest of the creative team land.

GAME NOTES

• Higgins’s job this week is to sift through a report he commissions from a consulting firm about the women’s team’s financial viability, picking up on last week’s thread. Their conclusion? The women’s side might sink the whole club. Once again, this is nonsense! Roy even spells it out: “A budget isn’t a real thing. It’s just a made-up number.” Don’t worry, Rebecca will still go through with it because they should, not because they could (even though they absolutely could). 

• The writers have fun with Rebecca’s revelation that she may be less feminist than she perceives herself to be, but her tersely polite dressing down of Alice at the end of the episode has an unpleasant power imbalance to it. The show wants to have it both ways: take Rebecca down a peg, but also remind Alice who’s really in charge. It doesn’t quite match up with the “strong women stand up for themselves, and stronger women stand up for others” thesis Higgins shares. (The tagged joke of Rebecca’s performative relief that Alice is staying doesn’t change that.)

• The funniest and most moving part of these first two episodes, however, has been Tanya Reynolds’s performance as assistant coach Alice Chilton. Some viewers may remember her as Lily, the alien porn writer on Netflix’s Sex Education. She stole every scene she was in on that program, and here, she not only lands her punchlines, but she acts like a real, lived-in character, compared to the bags of tics and tropes her castmates have fallen into over the years. (It also tickles this geriatric Millennial that her name is only a couple of letters away from the late frontman of Big Star. We can’t imagine this is a coincidence.)

Evan Davis is a contributing writer to Decider. He hosts Expected Own Goals, a podcast about women’s soccer.