Warning: This review contains spoilers for Ted Lasso season four.
For a series built on the belief that everybody deserves an opportunity, few moments in season four feel as rewarding as Shannon finally getting hers.
Once the young girl playing football on the streets of Richmond, she is now part of Richmond Women. Ted sees something in her when others do not, while Alice Chilton helps develop her game. When Shannon comes off the bench in episode nine scoring an important goal, it felt like years in the making.
Then, in the finale, she receives another reward, her first start for Richmond.
That is Ted Lasso at its best; somebody once living at the edge of the story becoming its centre. It also captures the frustration of this season. The series still knows how to make people matter. It simply does not give enough of Richmond Women the chance.
Richmond Women justify the return
Bringing Ted Lasso back after season three needed a reason, and Richmond Women provided one.
The show understands that women’s football comes with pressures of its own: sexism, attendance, visibility, motherhood and injury. Keeley’s attempts to promote the team matter because support is never treated as automatic.
By the time Nelson Road fills for Richmond Women, the crowd means something deeper than attendance.
Alice’s history as an Arsenal Women player whose career was cut short by an ACL injury is another strong example. It explains why she is guarded, intense and so emotionally attached to football without feeling like the writers are pausing to make a point.
The football itself largely feels authentic, while keeping Richmond’s men in the background for most of the season proves the right decision. This needed to belong to the women.
Alice shows what the season could have been
Tanya Reynolds’ Alice is arguably season four’s greatest success.
Her relationship with Gemma gives the season some of its richest writing. Their shared history is obvious without being over-explained. Gemma chose to make football part-time while studying law; Alice had football taken away from her altogether.
Neither character is completely right and neither is reduced to being wrong. That is where Ted Lasso has always been strongest: trying to understand why people behave as they do rather than telling us who to side with.
Episode seven, centred on Ted and Alice stepping outside their comfort zones, gives their relationship room to breathe. Ted’s influence changes Alice without turning her into a copy of him, particularly in the way she later backs Shannon.
By the finale, Alice becoming head coach feels earned. There is also a lovely parallel in Ted starting the season as an assistant manager in a supermarket and ending it as Alice’s assistant at Richmond.
Perhaps his biggest contribution is learning that he does not always have to be the most important person in the room.
So why do so many players remain strangers?
That success makes the lack of depth elsewhere more obvious.
Richmond’s original dressing room gave Jamie Tartt, Sam Obisanya, Roy Kent, Isaac McAdoo, Colin Hughes and Dani Rojas identities beyond the team sheet. Ted built relationships with them individually. He barely does that with this squad.
Lizzie Davis is the clearest missed opportunity. Faye Marsay gives her immediate authority as captain, but her life as a single mother of two offers much more. The pressures of childcare and building a football career after having children mostly remain in the background until late in the season.
Boots is similarly distinctive without becoming fully developed. Her refusal to wear goalkeeper gloves is memorable, but knowing unusual facts about somebody is not the same as knowing them.
Niamh and Siobhan Harrigan provide plenty of comedy yet rarely receive enough beyond it. Even Shannon spends much of the season waiting for the story to remember how much material already exists in her.
These are not uninteresting characters, in fact they are quite the opposite.
Season four repeatedly shows us stories worth telling, then moves elsewhere before many properly begin.
Looking back works when it knows when to stop
Most returning faces are handled well.
Trent Crimm and Dr Sharon Fieldstone are welcome reminders of Richmond’s history. Sam Obisanya’s move to Manchester United is a nice piece of continuity, while Jamie Tartt’s brief return is a delight.
Roy and Keeley take longer to justify their place. Revisiting their relationship initially feels like the series reaching backwards, but Keeley’s pregnancy gives it an emotional payoff in episode nine. Roy accepting the Chelsea head coach job in the finale resolves something separate: his professional future.
Less successful is Zelda. Tracey Ullman is entertaining, but the time devoted to her feels difficult to justify when so many Richmond Women remain underwritten.
The ownership storyline also leaves awkward questions around the Milk sisters’ shares, while the reduced Ted and Rebecca dynamic is surprising given how central their friendship once was.
Mae, the finale and what comes next
Episode nine’s focus on Mae is one of the season’s best decisions.
Mae has always represented Richmond beyond the club itself: the pub, the streets and the community around them. Placing her alongside Richmond Women gives her farewell another layer.
She belongs to a generation of women whose love of football existed long before comparable opportunities to build a life within the game. Watching this team pursue careers women like Mae could once only imagine gives the episode weight beyond nostalgia.
The finale is not exceptional, but it benefits from becoming character-driven. Promotion matters, yet the episode is more interested in what the season has changed in its people: Alice is ready to lead, Ted steps back, Roy chooses Chelsea and Lizzie’s family life finally comes further into view.
Shannon’s progression continues, too. After coming off the bench to score in episode nine, she is rewarded with her first start in the finale.
It works because her breakthrough has not appeared from nowhere. Ted believed in her, Alice helped develop her, and Shannon eventually earned the opportunity herself. An old character has not simply returned for a callback. She has moved forward.
With reports that pre-production on a fifth season has begun, Richmond Women’s promotion creates an obvious next step in the Women’s Super League.
That could put more eyes on the women’s game, even if television cannot magically turn casual viewers into committed supporters. What it can create is curiosity.
Season four proves that women’s football belongs comfortably at the centre of this universe. Its problem is that representation alone is not enough.
Putting women on the pitch is one thing, but allowing them to become as complicated, funny, frustrating and memorable as the men who played there before them is another.
Watching Shannon progress, Alice rediscover her place within football and Mae leave something of herself behind are reminders of why Richmond remains special. They also leave the feeling that some of this season’s best stories have barely begun.
Ted Lasso has always asked us to believe in people.
Now it needs to give more of them the chance to show us why.
Final Rating: 7/10
