New 'Ted Lasso' season features NWSL's Kansas City Current as plot point - ESPN

AFC Richmond is a fictitious English soccer club in the critically acclaimed show «Ted Lasso,» but the inspiration for the plot that follows in the show's fourth season is real: The Kansas City Current of the NWSL.

The new season's first episode was filmed over several weeks in Kansas City, with a key scene filmed at CPKC Stadium. There, the main characters watched a Kansas City Current match, which sets up the entire new season with Ted Lasso as coach of the newly created AFC Richmond women's team.

«It is a little bit proof of concept,» Kansas City Current co-owner Angie Long told ESPN. «Everything that we've built, even a show like 'Ted Lasso' is seeing it. So, I think it's endorsement. But again, what it means for sport, for women's soccer is huge.»

Angie Long said that producers from the Apple TV show approached them in April 2025 and came up with the entire idea. Jason Sudeikis, who plays Lasso in the show, is a superfan of Kansas City and women's sports — or as Angie Long puts it, he's more like «a friend of the team» as he has been to multiple Current games.

In the season debut episode of «Ted Lasso,» AFC Richmond's staff flies to Kansas City to tell Lasso that it is launching a women's team and it wants him to be the coach. (The plane used by the characters on the show is the Longs' real-life private plane.) But team owner Rebecca Welton (played by Hannah Waddingham) eventually needs her own inspiration after hearing news of another women's team folding due to financial troubles.

As doubt over the financial viability of a women's team appears to creep in, Welton's mind is changed by the sellout crowd and enthusiasm at CPKC Stadium for the Current. (Most of the fans in the scene are portrayed by Current