Apple TV's revived comedy "Ted Lasso" has returned for a fourth season with a new setup. Jason Sudeikis's title character now coaches AFC Richmond's newly formed women's soccer team rather than the men's Premier League squad he once led. But according to reporting from The New York Times, the show's fictional plotline has stumbled into a very real and well-documented problem in women's soccer coaching, the scarcity of female head coaches at the highest levels of the sport.
In the season's second episode, Ted Lasso arrives in England after three years coaching in Kansas to take over Richmond's women's team. He finds the job already occupied by Alice Chilton, a qualified former player turned assistant manager played by British actor Tanya Reynolds. Chilton is under budget and has been quietly building the team. She resigns in frustration after learning she was passed over for the head coaching role she expected to inherit. As The New York Times pointed out, the storyline unintentionally dramatizes a contradiction that has shadowed women's soccer for years. It is a sport increasingly run, in practice, by men at its top coaching levels.
The numbers back that up. Citing FIFA's latest "Setting the Pace" benchmark report, The New York Times noted that only 22 percent of head coaches across 669 clubs in 86 women's leagues worldwide are women. At the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup, just 12 of 32 national teams were led by female head coaches. In England's Women's Super League, only four of the league's 12 clubs currently employ women as head coaches. The pattern holds in the United States. Only four of the National Women's Soccer League's 16 clubs entered the 2026 season with female head coaches: Laura Harvey at Seattle Reign, Bev Yanez at Racing Louisville, Emma Coats at Bay FC and Filipa Patao at Boston Legacy. As recently as last season, Harvey and Yanez were the only two women holding head coaching jobs in the entire league. The New York Times cited that fact as evidence that even the current tally represents progress.
Speaking to The Athletic's Full Time podcast in July, Harvey, a three-time NWSL Coach of the Year, said the core issue has evolved rather than disappeared. When she began coaching in the NWSL in 2013, she said, many women preferred steadier jobs coaching college teams. Professional women's leagues in the U.S. carried a real risk of folding, as earlier iterations of the sport had. Now, she argued, the risk has shifted onto the employers making hiring decisions. "I have a very strong view that there is a perception that if you hire a female coach, the risk falls on the employer and the person that made that choice to employ the woman," Harvey said.
The New York Times traced that dynamic to a longstanding structural imbalance in women's soccer coaching. Men's soccer effectively functioned for decades as an internship pipeline. Retiring male players moved into academies, mentorships and assistant roles that eventually built toward elite head coaching jobs. Women's professional leagues, by contrast, were often unstable or nonexistent. That left far fewer academies, full-time coaching positions or years of accumulated experience for women to draw on when applying for top jobs.
Qualifications compound the gap. The UEFA Pro Licence is the highest coaching credential in European soccer and a requirement for top jobs. It currently takes 18 months to complete in England and costs roughly $19,000, according to England Football Learning, the Football Association's official education platform. Candidates must first hold UEFA A and B diplomas before even qualifying to enroll. The New York Times noted that nothing in those rules explicitly excludes women. But historically few had the access or opportunity to progress through the system far enough to pursue them. When UEFA launched an initiative in 2019 aimed at increasing the number of female coaches, women made up just three percent of the roughly 190,000 coaches holding UEFA-endorsed licenses at the time.
The Athletic separately reported that Mariana Cabral, a former Chicago Stars assistant coach, has struggled to gain access to Pro Licence courses. She has a background coaching senior women's teams in Portugal and a prior assistant role at Utah Royals. Those courses are increasingly treated as standard requirements for coaching jobs.
On screen, the show's own internal logic underscores the irony. Ted Lasso's original hiring, as The New York Times observed, was built on exactly the kind of opportunity women in real-world soccer have rarely received. He was an unqualified outsider handed a major coaching job on the strength of personality and potential rather than credentials. Six years and three prior seasons later, that same premise now plays out again with the women's team. Except this time the show has placed a qualified, credentialed woman, Chilton, on the other side of the decision, watching an inexperienced man get the chance she was denied.
Reynolds, who plays Chilton, told the Los Angeles Times she had never watched "Ted Lasso" before auditioning. She initially hesitated to take the role without reading a script, given the character's background as a tough former professional player. Show co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis said the character was partly shaped by his own experience working under female bosses, including Tina Fey during his years at "Saturday Night Live." Reynolds said she prepared by joining a gym, watching soccer matches and reading player memoirs. She was aided in part by insight from her cousin's wife, Austrian footballer Verena Hanshaw, who currently plays for FK Austria.
Whether the show intends to further explore the coaching disparity it has stumbled into remains to be seen as the season continues. But the real-world figures from FIFA, the NWSL and the Football Association suggest the gap Chilton's character embodies is not a plot device invented for television. It reflects a persistent imbalance in women's soccer coaching that experts say will take years of structural change to close.
