Ted Lasso Season 4, Episode 3 begins with AFC Richmond facing a challenge that is about far more than what happens on the football pitch. The club is attempting to build its women’s team from the ground up, but before the players can even take the field, the project is already facing doubts from the people who are supposed to believe in it. With a first friendly approaching and the club still trying to figure out exactly what this new team is going to become, the pressure begins mounting from every direction.

As the women’s team moves toward its first match, the episode makes one thing increasingly clear: building something new is considerably harder than believing in it.

The episode wastes little time establishing how complicated the women’s team’s arrival is going to be. At the first AFC Richmond shareholders’ meeting, the discussion quickly turns sour when one of the shareholders brings up a report posted on Reddit that Keeley has not even seen. Rebecca already knows about it but admits that she forgot to tell Keeley, immediately creating a problem at precisely the moment when the club needs everyone communicating with one another.

The bigger blow comes when Keeley learns that Pinter & Sons, which already sponsors Richmond’s men’s team and was expected to back the women’s side as well, is pulling out. The news lands just as Keeley is trying to rally everyone behind the project. After reading the report in one night, she insists that the Richmond Way can work, but only if everyone commits to making it happen together. More importantly, she tells Rebecca that they need to be honest with each other and stop withholding important information. Rebecca then breaks the news about Pinter & Sons, leaving Keeley to respond with a perfectly timed, “Why the f*** did you tell me that?”

The chaos surrounding the women's team only grows once the open tryouts begin. More than half of the candidates are eliminated almost immediately after the first test, which simply requires them to run across the field and back as quickly as possible. The drills that follow narrow the group down even further, with the coaching staff forced to make difficult decisions about who actually has the potential to become part of Richmond’s first women’s squad.

There is, however, one early moment that gives the team something to celebrate. Maria Rojas arrives at the tryouts, immediately exciting Ted and Coach Beard because she is the sister of Richmond’s famously enthusiastic striker Dani Rojas. Their excitement lasts until Maria reveals that she has never actually played football before.

That realization produces one of the episode’s funniest exchanges. When Maria struggles with the penalty shootout, Ted observes that the apple may have fallen rather far from the old tree, prompting Coach Chilton to add that it apparently fell right off a cliff into the depths of hell.

By the end of the selection process, only Lizzie and Shannon make the initial cut. Lizzie arrives with her child because she could not arrange childcare, quietly introducing another dimension to the women who are trying to build professional football careers while navigating lives outside the sport.

Shannon, meanwhile, is a very different case. She is not the strongest player available and is not even a natural striker, but Ted sees something in her that the other coaches do not. Where Beard and Chilton see someone who is not ready, Ted sees potential, effort and the willingness to learn.

That difference in perspective becomes one of the episode’s most revealing moments about Ted himself. He has never been particularly interested in simply identifying who is the best person in the room. He is far more interested in figuring out who might become the best version of themselves.

That is why, when Ted is sent to tell Shannon that she has not made the team, he cannot bring himself to deliver the rejection. Instead, he tells her that she made it. Coach Beard and Coach Chilton are left speechless.

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And just like that, Richmond’s first women’s team begins to take shape — not as the polished, fully formed operation everyone might have expected, but as a group of imperfect people who are going to have to figure things out together.

With the squad beginning to take shape, the problems around Richmond’s women’s team quickly move beyond the tryouts. Keeley is already scrambling to make sure the team is ready for its first friendly, while Rebecca is discovering that trying to build a new side is becoming increasingly difficult to balance with everything else happening around her.

Rebecca attempts to recover the Pinter & Sons sponsorship herself, visiting the company’s office to make her case in person. It takes some convincing, but she eventually manages to win the sponsor back, giving Richmond one less problem to worry about.

There is just one problem: Rebecca has once again forgotten about a dinner with her boyfriend, Matthijs. It is not the first time she has stood him up during the episode. In fact, it happens again later, when Keeley rushes into Rebecca’s office in tears after another crisis threatens to derail the team’s debut. For all the excitement surrounding Richmond’s new venture, the episode also quietly shows how easily Rebecca can become consumed by the club at the expense of everything outside it.

On the football side, Ted and Coach Chilton turn their attention toward Gemma, the striker Chilton believes could transform the team. There is clearly some history between the two women, making Chilton’s insistence that Gemma is exactly who Richmond needs particularly significant.

Ted and Chilton visit Gemma together, hoping to convince her to join. The conversation does not go exactly as planned. Gemma makes it clear that she appreciates being wanted, but she does not want to be part of the team and tells them to move on to whoever is next on their list.

Ted, however, refuses to let her dismiss herself that easily. He tells her that she is not simply the next name on Chilton’s list; she is her whole list. It is a small but telling moment. Meanwhile, Keeley is dealing with a much more immediate problem. The team’s kit bags still have not arrived, and with the first match rapidly approaching, there is suddenly no obvious solution. Keeley receives updates from her mentee that the shipment is still nowhere to be found, sending her into another spiral.

Eventually, the delivery truck arrives. Keeley rushes outside, relieved that the problem has finally been solved. The driver recognizes her from her Vanity Fair article, 'Woman on Top', creating another playful callback to the episode’s earlier joke about the headline from Roy Kent.

But when Keeley realizes what has actually been delivered, her relief turns into disbelief. It is not the kit bags. With just 45 minutes before the match and no realistic way to arrange equipment for 22 players, the situation looks hopeless. That is when Roy Kent steps in.

Roy sends Phoebe and her friends to collect their own kit bags and bring them to Keeley. It is exactly the sort of ridiculous, improvised solution that feels completely at home in the Richmond world, and somehow, it works. The team makes it to the pitch with the entire AFC Richmond Women's team wearing high school girls' jerseys covered with stickers and decorations. But having solved the problem off the field does not mean the match itself is going to be any easier.

The debut gets underway, and for most of the game, Richmond struggles to create anything resembling an attacking threat. Seventy-five minutes pass with the crowd growing restless and bored, while Ted’s son even asks his mother whether he really has to attend every women’s match.

Ted turns to Beard and asks how many shots on goal Richmond has managed. The answer is brutal. Zero. Then Chilton notices something else. Gemma is watching from the sidelines, and she is beginning to look restless. For all the uncertainty surrounding her decision, she clearly has not stopped thinking about the game. Ted and Chilton recognize the opportunity and make the call to put her on.

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And the moment Gemma steps onto the pitch, everything changes.

The decision to bring Gemma onto the pitch pays off almost immediately. After 75 minutes of a sluggish debut in which Richmond had barely threatened the opposition, Gemma finds her opportunity and scores the team’s first goal.

It is exactly the kind of moment Ted and Chilton had been waiting for. Richmond holds on, and the women’s team wins its debut match. The victory is important, but the episode does not treat it as some effortless triumph. The team has barely been assembled, the players are still learning how to play together and the club has spent the entire episode scrambling to make the match happen. Winning despite all of that makes the result feel less like the culmination of a perfect plan and more like the first genuine sign that this experiment might actually work.

Roy, meanwhile, has his own contribution to make. He arrives at Keeley’s office with what appears to be his version of a sustainability report for the AFC Richmond women’s team. The cover reads “Jones Report,” while the first page contains perhaps the most Roy Kent assessment imaginable:

“F*** EM.” It is a ridiculous final note to an episode that has spent much of its runtime dealing with shareholders, sponsors, reports and corporate headaches, but it also captures Roy’s role perfectly. 

Away from Richmond, the episode also continues developing the personal lives of the people surrounding the club. We discover that Ted’s son and Phoebe attend the same school, creating another small connection between Ted’s life in Richmond and the people he has become close to during his time there.

Rebecca’s personal life, however, remains considerably more chaotic. After repeatedly prioritizing Richmond over her relationship, she finally manages to make it to dinner with Matthijs. He is so thrilled that she has actually arrived that he excitedly points her out to the waiter, who has apparently become familiar with Matthijs’ previous abandoned dinners.

The waiter’s response provides the episode with its final punchline. After walking away from the table, he tells the bartender, “Poor chap. Had to hire a whore to save face.” It is a wonderfully absurd ending to an episode that otherwise spends much of its time establishing the foundations of Richmond’s newest team.

More importantly, Episode 3 makes the women’s team feel like more than a side project. The first match is won, but the bigger victory is that the team now has something to build on. Lizzie and Shannon have been given their opportunity, Gemma may have finally found her way onto the pitch, Keeley has shown that she will fight through every logistical disaster thrown at her, and Ted has once again demonstrated the belief in people that has become one of the defining ideas of Ted Lasso — something that also sits at the heart of the most important parenting lessons Sudeikis thinks people can take from the series.

The women’s team is far from finished. But after everything that goes wrong before its first match, Richmond finally has something it can celebrate: a beginning worth believing in.

But after everything that goes wrong before its first match, Richmond finally has something it can celebrate: a beginning worth believing in.

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With Richmond’s women’s team finally off the mark, the real question is how far this new chapter can go. Do you think the women’s side can become just as important to Ted Lasso as the original AFC Richmond team?