Ted Lasso season 4 episode 2 sends Jason Sudeikis back to Richmond, where he takes over AFC Richmond’s newly created women’s team. Rebecca Welton offers him the job after a three-year hiatus in Kansas City, but Alice Chilton is already on the touchline when he walks in.
The setup is not just a plot reset. It lands in the middle of a sport where only 22 per cent of head coaches across 669 clubs in 86 women’s leagues are women, according to FIFA’s latest Setting the Pace benchmark report.
Alice Chilton Already Has the Job
Alice Chilton is the coach Ted enters behind, and she is not a placeholder. She is a former player whose knee injuries ended her playing career and moved her into coaching, which makes the episode’s staffing choice more pointed than a simple handoff.
The show’s new coaching structure gives Ted the larger narrative spotlight even though Chilton is already qualified and already there as the team’s coach. That is the friction: the returnee drives the scene, while the woman with the job has to make room for him.
The NWSL Numbers
Four of the NWSL’s 16 clubs entered the 2026 season with female head coaches: Seattle Reign, Racing Louisville, Bay FC and Boston Legacy. Last season, Laura Harvey and Bev Yanez were the only two women holding head coach positions in the NWSL, and Harvey has been coaching in the league since 2013.
Harvey said in July that the problem has not disappeared, only shifted. “I think the issue itself hasn’t changed. Are there enough female coaches coaching as head coaches in the league? No, but I think the reason why has changed,” she said on The Athletic’s Full Time podcast. “But I think that the risk has now been pushed back the other way, to the people who employ,” she added.
What Richmond Changes
In England’s 12-team Women’s Super League, only four coaches are women, and at the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2023, 12 of 32 head coaches were women. Those figures make Richmond’s new women’s team feel less like a novelty and more like a test case for how often women are handed the authority that matches their experience.
The unanswered part is the working relationship. Ted has the name recognition, but Chilton has the job, and the episode leaves that power split in place. For viewers and for the sport itself, the real question is whether Richmond treats her as the lead coach or as the person who has to absorb his return.
