We’re three episodes into Ted Lasso’s latest campaign on Apple TV, which means we’ve got a solid sample of what Jason Sudeikis and the rest of the creative team are up to.

Largely, it’s more of the same. Keeley is still a burst of sunshine and fluffy pink. Roy is still a gruff but loving source of support. Rebecca is dizzyingly overworked but manages to stay fabulous while doing it, and her hunky Dutch boyfriend Matthijs (Matteo van der Grijn) doesn’t even mind getting stood up for a meal three times. 

Higgins is a charming dork. Beard is a football junkie with a self-aggrandizing mysterious side. Whether Nate, Jamie, Sam, Dr. Sharon, or “Trent Crimm: The Independent” will make appearances this year and give us Their Whole Thing is yet to be determined.

Most importantly, the show never met a sports cliché it couldn’t milk dry, and so we begin this week’s episode with yet another goalscoring talent stepping away from the team, her face streaming with tears on the trainer’s bench. This time, she’s pregnant. The team is now out of strikers. What will Ted and coach Alice Chilton do? 

Hold open tryouts, of course! Ted latches onto Alice’s joke and thinks it’s a swell idea. She’s nonplussed by his constant positivity, and I can hardly blame her. The Ted Lasso Experience™ is one that forces you to bend to his unyielding force of will that everything will be just fine if we believe in each other (pun intended). 

Before tryouts can commence, though, the gang must face the club shareholders, many of whom don’t take the concept of a women’s club seriously. 

One even brays that it could put the men’s side at financial risk as they push to qualify for the Champions League again, thus propelling this story runner forward from the first two episodes.

Richmond Ladies is a second-division club, and as such has much less money than giants like Arsenal or Chelsea. Lower-division women’s teams like Forest Green Rovers, Rotherham United, Durham, and Brunsmeer have all folded or are in danger of folding just in the past year alone!  

Let’s not forget that organized women’s soccer in England was illegal for 50 years, a ban that was only lifted in 1971. The men making their complaints in the meeting could be rudely described as parochial little Englanders who probably don’t cross the Thames very often, despite central London being less than 10 miles away. So, is the behavior from those shareholders unrealistic? Not necessarily. 

The counterpoint is that we live in an age where in the U.S., a National Women’s Soccer League club can be co-owned by Natalie Portman and valued at more than $300 million. In England’s top-flight league, the WSL, Arsenal play in front of almost 40,000 people at the Emirates Stadium every home game. Attendances are skyrocketing, revenues are pouring in, TV ratings are going up up up, and investors are getting wise to the notion that women’s soccer is big business. 

The most successful versions of that big business are the clubs with owners ready to pour money, staff and infrastructure into their women’s teams. The rejection of women’s football tends to be quieter and more insidious in the halls of power these days, akin to a man with no previous experience in the women’s game being handed the top job over a woman who was actually qualified. (Looking at you, Rebecca.) 

Ditto the club’s shirt sponsor getting cold feet about sponsoring the women as well. Seriously, does a bank like Pinter & Sons not recognize a growth sector when they see it?? At least Elaine Pinter admits she was wrong about Brexit.

In fairness to the writers, Arsenal’s and Chelsea’s success with fans has been among people who don’t go to men’s matches at all. Richmond’s sexist shareholders are not the Lady Greyhounds’ target audience. 

Rebecca pushes back against all of Keeley’s proposals, too, clearly rattled that the club could run out of money. When owners do that, things can quickly go awry. 

An early step on the path to success would be for Keeley and Rebecca to find people in Richmond who would be soccer fans but for the off-putting misogyny that often courses through the stands at men’s games. Rebecca’s rejoinder to the stuffy owner of the club’s shirt sponsor is another sign of her own shifting lens (though it’s presented as a moral argument, not a financial one). These quick pivots will give Richmond Ladies the ballast they need to move forward.

Ted Lasso isn’t showing toxic men to precisely reflect reality, but rather to set up its typical stakes. The underdog must be firmly established so that they may overcome impossible odds by season’s end. It’s how the men’s team somehow nearly won the Premier League title by the end of season 3, one year after getting promoted back to the division. The open tryouts the coaches hold are another way to show that the Lady Greyhounds are the little engine that could.

Nearly all the women who show up get cut pretty quickly, including men’s star Dani Rojas’s little sister, who shares his sunny disposition but none of his ability to kick a ball. 

The two standouts are a local kid, Shannon (Shannon Hayes), who you may recognize from past cameos in the show’s early seasons. Alice and Beard agree that she’s not ready for senior football at this level, and Ted goes to tell her the bad news. Except, he signs her instead. If you don’t think she’s gonna do something heroic that wins Richmond a crucial game later on this season, then I’ve got some beautiful oceanfront property in Arizona to sell you. 

The other player they take is Lizzie (Faye Marsay), a defender who’s also the mother of a young son she has to bring along since she couldn’t get childcare. When you discover just how hard players in America and Europe have fought to earn the right to have formal childcare at their clubs, you’ll wish we had just signed the Equal Rights Amendment back in the 1970s when we had the chance. 

Lizzie’s natural leadership, even with women she barely knows, tells the coaches that they need her. Shannon’s a wait-and-see kind of prospect, and neither answer the question of who will score them goals. Alice has a player in mind: Gemma (Abbie Hern), who plays street soccer and goes to law school. She doesn’t even acknowledge Alice when the coach goes to recruit her. It turns out that Alice rode her too hard back when they were teammates, and she quit the sport. Alice thinks she doesn’t have the spine to tough it out. 

Ted informs Gemma that she was the only player Alice recommended, which makes her realize that maybe Alice did see her value. A scroll of social media during study break brings up Chloe Kelly’s game winner for England in the Euro 2022 final; that seals it. She joins the team, while still moonlighting as a law student. 

Wouldn’t you know it, it’s Gemma who gets subbed in during Richmond’s first preseason friendly game. 

She of course scores the last-second winner. The players go nuts. The coaches go nuts. The fans go nuts. Ted gasses her up. Alice, meanwhile, curtly tells her what she needs to do better. Some big blow-up is coming between the two, until they get past it and all sense of conflict is erased. It’s the Ted Lasso way. 

GAME NOTES

• If Tanya Reynolds gave the repertory company a much-needed injection of life last week, it’s Marsay’s turn as Lizzie to do the same. She seems poised to become the team’s soulful center, and given Marsay’s breathtaking performance as Vel in Andor (especially the series finale), you’ll realize that Sudeikis and crew cast the right actor. 

• Another tip of the cap to Abbie Hern, whose first go-round as Gemma promises some flintiness and spice the show has been sorely lacking. 

• That Euro 2022 final — a tectonic event in the history of women’s soccer in England — is what sparked Sudeikis to return to Ted Lasso and make the next phase of the show about a women’s team.

• What about our original Scooby Gang? Keeley battles a delivery service to get uniforms that don’t arrive on time, leading Roy to deputize his niece Phoebe and her friends to make bespoke ones. I must say they are even more charming and Keeley-esque than Richmond’s standard look. 

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