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TED LASSO’S THIRD season was supposed to be its last. But on 5 August, its fourth season will air on Apple TV.

So what happened to bring it back? Here’s everything you need to know about Ted Lasso season four.

Yes, it was assumed to be. At the end of season three, the plucky football coach Ted Lasso headed back to Kansas. And there were already chats about a Roy Kent spinoff show, focused on the character played by Brett Goldstein. It seemed like Ted Lasso had done his time on our TV screens.

But over the last few years, Ted Lasso series creator Jason Sudeikis realised that actually there was more of the story that he wanted to tell.

As The Hollywood Reporter puts it:

From the outset, Sudeikis had said that he had three seasons ofLassoin his head, and despite collecting $1 million per episode by season three (and significantly more if he agreed to continue), he wasn’t eager to keep going just to keep going. “That wasn’t a negotiation tactic,” Sudeikis says over drinks in mid-June. “The story was told. Ted went home [to Kansas City] to be with his son. I wasn’t going to have Ted uproot their life to justify the money truck. It made no sense to me.”

Sudeikis had also been experiencing a lot in his personal life, such as a very public and acrimonious divorce from actor/director Olivia Wilde, so his colleagues weren’t sure he’d be eager to get back to writing.

But it turned out he couldn’t leave the Ted Lasso story alone, so now it’s returning to Apple TV.

Well, Sudeikis told THR that Lasso’s positive attitude charmed fans, and it also had an impact on his life.

He said:

“It is infectious to play a character who sees the best in people and isn’t mad at the world for all its foibles and bullies and shadows. It’s not like I’m Daniel Day-Lewis, but it was good to live in that — to have that coursing through your brain and your body all day…It still is.”

His comments speak to the series’ popularity, which in large part comes down to the need for positivity that people had during the Covid pandemic, when the series launched. Its roots were in a 2013 comedy skit for NBC Sports, starring Sudeikis, and over the years he and his writing team expanded Lasso into an American coach who ends up working in the UK, a fish-out-of-water setup that had a cheesy but beloved sentimentality at its core.

However, as the series got more popular, by season three things were more difficult in the background. There were delays, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and it ran over-budget. Unsurprisingly, it seemed like it was all coming to an end with the third season.

So when Sudeikas decided to bring back Ted Lasso for a fourth season, he also brought new personnel on board, like new showrunner Jack Burditt. The focus of Ted Lasso’s work at AFC Richmond also changed. With all those changes comes a bit of a fresh start for Ted and the show.

In this latest season, the attention turns from AFC Richmond’s male team to its female team, the ‘Lady Greyhounds’.

Ted returns to Richmond, taking on his biggest challenge yet: coaching a second division women’s football team. Throughout the course of the season, Ted and the team learn to leap before they look, taking chances they never thought they would.

While many old faces are present, there’s a whole new team to meet, and a new assistant coach, Alice Chilton, played by Tanya Reynolds (Sex Education, The Other Bennet Sister).

After a somewhat tumultuous third season, there’s the hope season four will recapture a lot of the magic of season one.

When can we watch it?

Ted Lasso season four will stream on Apple TV from 5 August.

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