Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Ted Lasso
Ted Lasso has never been particularly concerned about being qualified for the job.
When AFC Richmond first hired him, that was the joke: an American football coach who knew nothing about the “other” football was handed the keys to a struggling Premier League club. He did not know the basic rules like offside or corner, nor had necessary coaching certification traditionally required to manage at that level. Yet he was happy to take the job.
Six years later, that joke lands a little differently.
After his three-year hiatus in Kansas City, Lasso accepts AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Welton’s offer and returns to Richmond to coach the club’s newly created women’s team in this second episode of the new season. The team already has a coach, though: Alice Chilton, a former player whose unfortunate knee injuries ended her playing career and moved her into coaching. She is qualified and dedicated and — of course — is already there. Until Ted Lasso walks through the door.
This plot is meant to create another version of the show’s “fish out of water brings success” dynamic. But this time, perhaps intentionally, “Ted Lasso” stumbled into one of the most talked-about contradictions in women’s soccer: the absence of female coaches.
According to FIFA’s latestSetting the Pace benchmark report, only 22 per cent of head coaches across 669 clubs in 86 women’s leagues around the world are women. At the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 2023, 12 of 32 head coaches were women. At club level, in the 12-team Women’s Super League in England, only four coaches are women. And in the U.S., the situation is not much different. Only four of the National Women’s Soccer League’s (NWSL) 16 clubs entered the 2026 season with female head coaches: Laura Harvey at Seattle Reign, Bev Yanez at Racing Louisville, Emma Coats at Bay FC and Filipa Patao at Boston Legacy.
And believe it or not, this is progress. Last season, Harvey and Yanez were the only two women holding head coach positions in the league.
“I think the issue itself hasn’t changed. Are there enough female coaches coaching as head coaches in the league? No, but I think the reason why has changed,” Harvey told The Athletic’s Full Time podcast in July. According to the three-time NWSL Coach of the Year, back when she started coaching in the NWSL in 2013, women coaches preferred more established jobs like coaching college teams, as it was a huge risk to take on a job at a league that risked being folded like previous iterations of women’s pro soccer in the U.S.
“But I think that the risk has now been pushed back the other way, to the people who employ, ” she said. “I have a very strong view that there is a perception that if you hire a female coach, the risk falls on the employer and the person that made that choice to employ the woman.”
If you watch the latest “Ted Lasso” episode, you may find Harvey’s insight familiar.
For decades, the soccer ecosystem operated as one enormous coaching internship program for male soccer players. When their knees gave out, or their playing careers eventually ended, they went into coaching academies, were offered internships, enjoyed mentors and landed assistant coaching jobs that eventually led them to elite coaching positions.
Women frequently didn’t have the same opportunities.
Professional women’s leagues either didn’t exist or folded regularly. There were fewer academies, fewer full-time coaching jobs and fewer opportunities to spend a decade collecting the experience that would eventually make someone a candidate for an elite coaching position.
There is a certain irony in exploring that history through this TV series, because Lasso’s own coaching career is built on precisely the kind of opportunity women have rarely received.
His entire story begins because Rebecca Welton hands an absurdly underqualified American football coach a big job in English soccer. Lasso did not have the right experience. He did not have the right qualifications. Initially, he barely had the right vocabulary. Yet he got the opportunity. Three seasons in, he now has a résumé.
But with the interest and investment at an all-time high in women’s soccer, with clubs becoming more valuable and with top players competing at an elite level, owners who spend millions of dollars on these teams have different, albeit higher, expectations. As Harvey put it, they don’t want to risk having a female coach. They want experience. They want qualifications. They want someone who has already operated inside an elite environment.
And this is where it gets complicated for women. Unlike Lasso, real coaches cannot simply arrive from Kansas, bake excellent biscuits and charm their way onto a Premier League bench. They need certifications.
The UEFA Pro Licence is the highest coaching qualification in European football and is required for the top jobs. In England, the course currently takes 18 months and costs $19,000 (£14,000). Before applicants can even get there, they must also hold UEFA A and B diplomas, according to England Football Learning, the official education platform in English football, overseen by the Football Association (The FA).
None of those rules say women cannot apply. But historically, very few did or had the opportunity to get far enough through football’s system to do so. When UEFA began an initiative aimed at increasing the number of female coaches in 2019, women represented only three per cent of roughly 190,000 coaches holding UEFA-endorsed licenses.
In a recent interview with The Athletic, former Chicago Stars assistant coach Mariana Cabral acknowledged the problem of access. She said that despite a history of working with senior women’s teams in Portugal, as well as being an assistant coach at Utah Royals before Chicago, she has struggled to gain access to the Pro Licence courses. These are becoming regular qualifications for assistant and head coach positions in the women’s game.
Things are improving. According to UEFA, the number of female coaches with UEFA C, B, A, or Pro Licence qualifications rose to 25,000 in 2024, an increase of more than 75 per cent in eight years, thanks to scholarships and mentoring programs and national associations reserving at least 10 per cent of annual coaching-course places for qualified female applicants. Similar to UEFA, FIFA announced a new coaching mandate in March.
But licensing is only one part of the problem. To earn the highest qualifications, coaches generally need experience. To acquire meaningful experience, somebody has to hire them. And when clubs make those hires, they tend to prefer candidates who already possess experience. The ultimate Catch-22.
It is here that Lasso’s fictional career becomes an unexpectedly useful comparison. Lasso was allowed to acquire elite experience by being given an elite job before he possessed it. Most coaches, and particularly women trying to enter a historically male profession, are asked to demonstrate that experience before anyone will give them the job.
But change is coming and not only because football’s governing bodies are handing out opportunities.
There is a generation of female pro players who are wrapping up successful and lengthy legitimate careers where they played at an elite level, coached by some of the best in business, winning championships, Olympics and World Cups. They have accumulated a depth of soccer knowledge that previous generations of women were often denied the opportunity to acquire professionally. They also finally have a network of women who pioneered as coaches to mentor them.
Racing Louisville coach Bev Yanez is an example of what that pathway can look like. Before becoming a coach, Yanez spent years as a professional player, including under Harvey in Seattle. For Yanez, Harvey not only provided coaching education but also an example of a woman building a long-term career as an elite coach.
NWSL is not the only place where we have seen progress. There are signs at the European club level, too. While AFC Richmond has turned its women’s team over to Lasso, Manchester United recently went in the opposite direction, appointing 40-year-old Spaniard Eva Olid, who just led Hearts to their first Scottish Women’s Premier League title, to replace Marc Skinner.
That is why Alice Chilton’s experience in the show is more interesting than simply asking whether Lasso deserves her job. In fact, Lasso’s own story suggests why opportunity matters so much. He became a credible coach because somebody was willing to give him a job before his résumé said he was ready for it. He was allowed to learn, fail, adapt and eventually turn that opportunity into experience.
But something tells me Alice Chilton’s path to the top job will be more similar to that of Emma Hayes, one of the most decorated female coaches in history. Before arriving at the USWNT, winning Olympic gold in Paris in 2024, Hayes led Chelsea FC to seven Women’s Super League titles. Hayes often speaks about her mentor, Sir Alex Ferguson, who according to this interview,is her “biggest champion.”
Maybe Lasso will be Alice Chilton’s Alex Ferguson. He might be an OK coach, but he’s one hell of a cheerleader.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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