Add Ted Lasso to your watchlist
Ted Lasso wakes up back where he belongs, returned to south-west London’s leafiest enclave from his native Kansas, summoned once more for his unique skills in getting the best out of an English football team. Refusing his landlady’s offer of a morning Guinness, he steps out onto Richmond Green, where he’s greeted by a fan. “Welcome back, Coach,” says a man in a football scarf. Pause. “Too bad you’re coaching a bunch of girls.”
Because there’s the rub of series four of this gentle comedy. Still as wholesome as Ted’s homemade shortbread cookies, it’s back after a three-year hiatus, due to public demand. This chapter’s peril arrives with a women’s team, as scrappy, volatile and competitive (with each other) as you’d imagine, and more than ready for a bit of Ted’s singular apple-pie polish.
Cue a greatest hits compilation of the challenges facing women in what is still overarchingly a men’s sport: their entire team crammed into a locker room the size of the men’s boot cupboard; Ted being accosted in the pub – “How are the girls, slow? Boring?”. Even the indomitable Rebecca finds herself on the wrong end of the equality stick when she’s asked about hiring Ted to coach the Lady Greyhounds: “Did you ever consider any women?” Gulp.
The women’s team is more than ready for Ted’s apple-pie polish
It’s hard to believe Ted’s fresh challenge comes almost a quarter of a century after what remains the defining screen ode to women playing football. Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham saw teenager Jesminder defy her Sikh family to play for her local Hounslow Harriers, a move that inspires Lasso-like barbs – one teenage boy inevitably asking, “Do you swap shirts at the end of matches?” – but with a much more layered palette, courtesy of her parents’ stupefaction and rich traditions.
Her mother despairs: “What kind of family will want a daughter-in-law who can run around kicking a football all day but can’t make round chapati?”, while her father disapproves of her bedroom walls: “Why don’t you put up some nice pictures of beautiful scenery instead of these bald men?” (David Beckham was in his head-shaven era at the time).
Twenty-four years apart, both narratives rely on one central idea – the unlikelihood of a girl wanting to play football, hence the tut-tutting of Jesminder’s family, who have never countenanced it, and Richmond FC’s lack of readiness to accommodate it.
Compare this with, say, Fast Girls, about the GB women’s relay team. Because athletics has always included women, this 2012 film focused instead on a class-based clash of privilege and resources between team members; no character had to justify wanting her place on the track.
Out in the real world, something shifted after Beckham, and before Ted. There have long been admirers, male and female, of the women’s game – more free-flowing action, fewer stoppages, far less diving – but ultimately, success is what draws us in. England’s Lionesses are currently World Cup runners-up and European champions. Set against this real-life fairy tale, the tropes of Ted’s female Greyhounds and their doubters all feel a bit reductive, but perhaps we’re still a few turns away from the day when, like stories of gay people and mixed marriages before them, women playing football will no longer be the headline.
As one spectator who was at Wembley to see the Lionesses’ glorious victory over Germany in 2022 described it to me, “For the first time it felt like they weren’t men or women out there, they were just people on the pitch.”