Last year Daniel Parslow, a former soccer coach, hosted a tryout.
Roughly 500 women were competing for spots on the Lady Greyhounds, the fictional soccer team that takes the pitch in the fourth season of “Ted Lasso,” the Apple TV sports comedy. Parslow, an assistant director who helps to choreograph the show’s soccer sequences, had worked with male players for the first three seasons. With the women, he noticed an immediate difference.
Yes, these women wanted to make the squad, wanted it badly. But their attitude at the tryout was never cutthroat. “It wasn’t as heated in terms of battling against each other,” he said. The players, while scoring goals, were also working toward a common one: showing Parslow the excellence of women in soccer.
“It was not just, OK, I’m an individual in a sport that’s already lauded,” Parslow said. “There was this thing of, we’re here to grow this as a concept.”
Football, which is how most of the world outside of America refers to soccer, is big business. The recent World Cup, particularly the knockout match in which the United States lost to Belgium, was a ratings whopper. And while the women’s game still lags in ticket sales and attendance, that gap is closing.
Over the years, women’s team sports have occasionally generated galvanizing events (the U.S. teams’ World Cup victories), media moments (Brandi Chastain on the cover of Sports Illustrated) and the occasional film (“Bend It Like Beckham”). The W.N.B.A. was founded in 1996, after the U.S. women’s Olympic team’s sensational run to the gold medal.
But they have not sustained broad, consistent attention until more recent years, which have seen the arrival of transcendent cultural figures (Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Megan Rapinoe), dedicated sports bars, lucrative broadcast rights, billion-dollar league valuations and the world’s first purpose-built stadium for women’s sports. Women’s soccer is predicted to become a Top 5 global sport by the end of this decade.
Cheryl Cooky, a Purdue professor who studies the intersections of gender, sport and culture, has charted this rise in interest and popularity.
“Women’s sports are part of this cultural zeitgeist,” she said. “Historically, we have been outright excluded from a lot of different opportunities. Now we’re seeing the fruits of that struggle come to light.”
These fruits now include a central role on one of TV’s most eagerly anticipated shows. For “Ted Lasso,” which returned this month after a pause of more than three years, the Lady Greyhounds bring both new cultural relevance and a new challenge: How to deliver enough of the “Ted Lasso” tone to please old fans while also changing with the times and the gender so that it can welcome new ones. And the show has to weather online detractors, who have questioned the turn to women’s sports, calling it a form of virtue signaling.
Tanya Reynolds, who plays Alice, the Lady Greyhounds’ assistant coach, sees the decision to center a women’s team as welcome and obvious.
“Why wouldn’t you pay attention to over half of the population?” she said. “Anything that men do, we can do bleeding.”
Jason Sudeikis, the star and co-creator, has been a visible supporter of women’s sports, a regular courtside presence at W.N.B.A. games and the proud owner of an “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports” T-shirt. Plans for a fourth season began last year, and when Sudeikis invited the writer and producer Jack Burditt to come on as a showrunner, “My first question was, ‘Is it going to be a women’s team?’” Burditt recalled. “And he smiled.”
Brendan Hunt, a co-creator and star, also credited Sudeikis with the shift to a women’s team, which was hinted at in the Season 3 finale. But Hunt, a fan of women’s sports since childhood (the bar where his mother worked sponsored a women’s softball team), cited as further inspiration England’s thrilling win over Germany in the 2022 UEFA Women’s Euro final, before a record crowd at Wembley Stadium in London.
“That was so incredible being there for that, seeing the country come around to women’s soccer,” he said.
A switch to female protagonists has opened up new story possibilities. In the first season, Ted Lasso inherited a fully rostered, if dysfunctional, men’s squad, but the women’s team must be built from the ground up, with fewer resources.
“We have an opportunity to tell stories of some of the struggle of women athletes,” Burditt said, citing the modest pay, particularly in lower leagues. “It is not about the fame for them, it is not about the fortune — it is 100 percent about the love of the game. There’s a desire burning in them to play.”
The female body can also drive stories. Certainly no male Greyhound ever had to step away from the team because he was pregnant, and this season one team leader must balance her passion for the sport with the demands of single motherhood. Showing women as athletically excellent also has the potential to disrupt and enlarge an understanding of gender roles.
“Sport has been linked so intricately both culturally and historically to men and to masculinity, when women are entering into that space, it can be seen as really culturally threatening,” Cooky said. “But it can also be seen as really empowering.”
Parslow and his colleagues had no problem finding players to fill out the team. The main actors — some experienced players, some not — were put through a boot camp to bring their skills up. Abbie Hern, who plays a striker on the team, was devoted to soccer until her teens, “before I learned what makeup was,” she said. She and her colleagues enjoyed the boot camp.
“We all felt extremely competent and, dare I say, cocky,” she said. Then the production brought in the extended team, some of them professional players.
“We were humbled pretty quickly,” Hern said, but the professionals were supportive. “Anything that needed tweaking, any skill that we wanted to learn, they would be like, let’s go,” she said.
There is some tension, at least initially, in how to insert the Lady Greyhounds into the show’s playbook. They don’t appear in the first episode — instead the camera still delights in Ted and his mustache — and it is unclear whether any of them will become as central to the series as players like Roy (Brett Goldstein) and Jamie (Phil Dunster) did in earlier seasons. Later episodes show how fans and the media resist a women’s team, which seems to mirror what the creators and crew fear of some “Ted Lasso” fans.
“We have a load of stigma from a lot of people who will judge women’s football,” Parslow said.
But he and Burditt insisted the soccer sequences would be just as exciting, even if the tempo of the women’s play was arguably slower. “The men are faster,” Burditt said. “With the women, maybe it’s more strategic. At least you can see it better.”
As for the non-sports scenes, this new “Ted Lasso” is, for better and worse, the “Ted Lasso” of old, with a few more ponytails. The folksy humor is the same, as is the belief in human goodness and potential.
“If you watched the show and now you think it’s gone ‘woke,’ well, I don’t know how much attention you were paying before,” Hunt said. “We’ve always had a fairly empathetic bent.”
Burditt has absorbed some of the anticipatory online hate. “I go on social media,” he said. “I see what people say, and it’s bad at times.
“Anybody who goes in with preconceived notions of women’s sports, I don’t know if we’re going to change their mind,” he continued. “But I hope they try out the show.”
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