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 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 they are launching a women’s team and they want 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 employees.)
Call it art imitating life: Kansas City is one of the NWSL’s ultimate success stories in the real world. Controlling owners Angie and Chris Long largely funded and built CPKC Stadium, the first stadium built specifically for an NWSL team, a project they started in 2022 on the belief that their investment would pay off.
The team has announced a sellout crowd of 11,500 fans for every league match since the stadium opened in 2024 and is expected to soon expand the stadium to 18,000 seats. Not to mention, a billion-dollar riverfront neighborhood in Kansas City is planned around a women’s soccer stadium.
Women’s sports, including the NWSL, are rapidly growing by most business metrics, but issues like paltry salaries and teams folding existed until recent years. Kansas City had an NWSL team that failed before the Current — the defunct club FC Kansas City — and there was plenty of skepticism when the Longs purchased the franchise and brought an NWSL team back to Kansas City in December 2020.
Season four of “Ted Lasso” begins with reminders of those realities. As Welton gets ready to go to the Current game, AFC Richmond director of football operations Leslie Higgins (played by Jeremy Swift) informs Welton of a rival team in England folding its women’s side due to financial issues. Welton shakes him off and maintains her optimism — at least at first.
“Yes, we shall succeed where others have failed for some unknown reason out there somewhere, somehow,” Higgins says sarcastically in the show.
Those scenes are all too real for the players and staff who have lived through such moments. The NWSL is the third iteration of a professional women’s soccer league in the United States and the first that managed to kick off a fourth season. That was in 2016 — and next year the league will celebrate 15 seasons.
Along the way, teams have relocated and folded (some have even been revived), and players have fought for living wages after making $6,000 per year at the outset of the league. Shoestring budgets have turned into teams valued at hundreds of millions of dollars and a league with a swanky office in the center of Manhattan.
Now, the NWSL is in its growth stage, with double the number of teams (16) as when the league launched in 2013. The NWSL and its teams are trying to appeal to the masses beyond just their devoted fan base. The league is trying to scale up — even sometimes at the cost of diehards — and that means reaching new fans in new spaces.
But the tie-in with “Ted Lasso” — a popular comedy about soccer — feels organic and exactly the type of promotion the league has been looking for. It was the most-streamed original show in the United States in 2023 with 16.9 billion minutes streamed, according to Nielsen data. It has received 61 nominations for Primetime Emmys and won 13 times.
The previous three seasons focused on the men’s team of AFC Richmond, and the fourth season just might reach an audience that is new to professional women’s soccer.
“They have the ability to raise the profile of women’s sports in such an accelerated way than even we can do on the field,” Angie Long said. “I think it’s fantastic. Maybe this is the Taylor Swift effect that she had on the NFL and the Chiefs, I don’t know.
“But I think that opening the lens, raising the profile is huge; it’s exactly what we want. We’re going into a World Cup year in a year, and we have the Olympics coming, then the Women’s World Cup is going to be here [in 2031]. So, it’s just another thing feeding momentum and really broadening the audience.”
The “Ted Lasso” cast filmed in the city for about three weeks, and the first episode captures Kansas City barbeque, fashion and jokes (“Kansas looks good on you,” Keeley Jones — played by Juno Temple — says to a bedazzled Welton, who replies: “Unless this is f—ing Missouri.”)
Observant NWSL fans will also appreciate the authenticity of the season-four premiere. The cast spent an 11-hour day filming at the stadium in July 2025 before editors spliced together the acted scenes with real game footage that was captured at an NWSL game.
The Longs and their eldest daughter, Abigail, make cameos as background actors on the suite level of CPKC Stadium as the four main characters got a walking tour of the stadium. (The Longs had their scene with lines cut from the final edit.) That tour was given by a woman actor wearing a sports blazer in the team’s distinct teal color, which is the gameday fit of the team’s VP of communications, Dani Welniak.
After the four characters find their seats in the show, the screen cuts to two-time reigning NWSL MVP and Golden Boot winner Temwa Chawinga scoring a goal for the Current. Jones looks around in awe as the stadium erupts, just as it does in real life.
“We’re just riding the same wave that we’re lucky enough to catch with soccer over here, football over there,” Sudeikis said in a real-life press conference at CPKC Stadium last month during the World Cup, which held games in Kansas City. He was wearing a “USWNT” T-shirt depicting two-time World Cup winner Megan Rapinoe doing her famous goal celebration from 2019.
“The sport’s older than any of us and it will be here long after us. I think it’s really neat what’s been going on here and has been going on here for a while, especially with the Current — but also from way back with the Comets, with the Wiz, with Sporting KC. It has a legacy.” (The Comets, an indoor soccer team, was where Kansas City Current sporting director Vlatko Andonovski played before turning to coaching. The Wiz preceded Sporting Kansas City in MLS.)
Chris Long said that he has not seen the rest of season four of “Ted Lasso” yet, but he’s eager to see how the story plays out as the characters return to England and try to figure out how to create a successful women’s soccer team.
“What wasn’t a focus [in the first episode] is all the stuff that comes next: the trials and tribulations on day one with the squad,” Chris Long told ESPN. “What does that mean facilities wise? What does that mean in the community? How do you fill the stands? So, I am excited for what’s to come, because I feel like in many ways, we’ll see some other threads that are common to the Kansas City Current given how much time we’ve been able to spend with them.”
Jeremy Swift alluded to as much in last month’s press conference when he spoke about the entire fourth season of the show. He was discussing his character, Higgins, and the fictional team on the wildly popular fictional show. However, his sentiment was equally applicable to the Current, the NWSL, and all of women’s sports as it grows.
“What this season goes to address — certainly Higgins does — is to try and support women’s football financially and with integrity,” Swift said. “Because there’s a lot of lip service given to it. It’s like, it’s exciting, it’s new. But it needs backing.”
A prominent place in the plot of a popular show like “Ted Lasso” will provide that — even just a little — for the team, the league and the sport.
