Why is Ted Lasso even back for season 4? Blame one summer of English football — plus the full release schedule
The show that ended perfectly in 2023 un-ended itself for a very specific real-world reason, and it happened at Wembley.
Ted Lasso season 3 was built, marketed, and mourned as the ending. So why is Jason Sudeikis's mustache back on Apple TV three years later, coaching again? The honest answer isn't a spreadsheet or a desperate streamer — it's July 31, 2022, the day England's Lionesses beat Germany in extra time at Wembley and won Euro 2022, the country's first major senior football trophy since 1966.
The Ted Lasso team was in London filming season 3 while it happened. Co-creator Brendan Hunt watched the national mood flip in real time, recalling:
"Suddenly, the whole country was women's football crazy."
Sudeikis — already a WNBA obsessive with New York Liberty season tickets — felt it too:
"The whole country was celebrating, so it was incredibly exciting."
They met some of the players, consulted figures from the women's game (including sit-downs with Lionesses captain Leah Williamson), and left themselves an escape hatch: that throwaway season 3 finale beat where Keeley and Rebecca float a Richmond women's team wasn't a loose end. It was insurance. Hunt spent the next two years sending Sudeikis what he called a "baby-step text message of intrigue" every few months until the call finally came.
What season 4 actually is
Ted returns to Richmond to coach the AFC Richmond Lady Greyhounds, a second-division women's side with a shoestring budget and facilities shared with the men's team. New cast includes Tanya Reynolds as Alice Chilton, the women's coach who greets Ted's arrival with open skepticism, and Grant Feely as Ted's now-teenage son Henry — alongside returning Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple, Brett Goldstein, Jeremy Swift, and Hunt's Coach Beard. Apple says the premiere broke the platform's viewership records.
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The full release schedule
The season runs 10 episodes, weekly — dropping Tuesday evenings in the Americas (6 p.m. PT / 9 p.m. ET), Wednesdays everywhere else:
- Episodes 1–8: out now (premiere August 5; episode 8 landed September 22/23)
- Episode 9: September 29/30
- Episode 10, season finale: October 6/7
Which means exactly two episodes remain — and the finale lands on the same Wednesday the rest of network TV's fall season kicks into gear.
Previously we wrote: Lioness season 4: renewed or cancelled? Paramount's silence looks bad — until you check how seasons 2 and 3 happened
