Ted Lasso is coming back. Apple TV released the first teaser trailer for Season 4 on Tuesday, April 28, 2026, and confirmed that the show will premiere on August 5, 2026.
New episodes will drop every Wednesday through an October 7 finale. The season runs 10 episodes. It has been more than three years since Season 3 ended in 2023.
The returning cast is largely intact. The premise is completely new. The show that was definitively described as finished is back, with a specific story reason that was planted in the final minutes of the season that supposedly ended everything.
What Is Season 4 Going To Be About?
Ted returns to Richmond to coach a second division women’s football team, described in the official synopsis as his biggest challenge yet.
The full logline reads:
“Throughout the course of the season, Ted and the team learn to leap before they look, taking chances they never thought they would.”
This is a meaningful structural departure from everything the show has done before. The first three seasons all centered on AFC Richmond’s men’s team, Ted’s journey from fish-out-of-water American football coach to beloved Premier League figure, the team’s relegation, promotion and eventual return to the top flight.
The women’s team storyline was not invented for Season 4. It was seeded in the Season 3 finale, when Keeley proposed an AFC Richmond women’s soccer venture to Rebecca. That seed is now the entire premise.
The teaser’s defining moment is a fan encounter that sets the season’s central conflict in a single line.
Ted walks through a Richmond alley and bumps into a supporter who says, “Welcome back, Coach. Too bad you’re coaching a bunch of girls, you wanker.”
That sentence is the show’s thesis for 10 episodes, the cultural resistance that a women’s football team in England faces, filtered through Ted Lasso’s relentless optimism and refusal to accept that belief is conditional on gender.
The trailer also shows Ted’s wife Michelle and his son Henry in the stands.
Henry is now played by Grant Feely, who previously played young Luke Skywalker in Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, taking over the role from Gus Turner, who played Ted’s son in all three previous seasons. The teaser is scored to “Rubber Band Man” by Mumford & Sons and Hozier.
Who Is Returning?
The core cast returns in full. Hannah Waddingham is back as AFC Richmond owner Rebecca Welton. Brett Goldstein returns as Roy Kent, the gruff former footballer turned assistant coach.
Juno Temple is back as publicist Keeley Jones. Brendan Hunt returns as Coach Willis Beard. Jeremy Swift is back as Leslie Higgins, the Director of Football Operations who has been one of the show’s most reliable sources of both comedy and unexpected warmth.
The teaser drops specific hints about where those characters are headed. Roy and Keeley are shown reuniting in front of a visibly uncomfortable Higgins, whatever happened between them in the gap since Season 3 is clearly unresolved.
Rebecca is shown sharing a kiss with the Dutchman, the character she was building a connection with by the end of Season 3.
Rebecca and Keeley are shown working together again in what appears to be the women’s team venture that Keeley first proposed in the Season 3 finale.
The notable absences from the confirmed cast list matter. Phil Dunster as Jamie Tartt is not returning.
Nick Mohammed as Nate Shelley is not returning. Sarah Niles as Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, Toheeb Jimoh as Sam Obisanya, Cristo Fernández as Dani Rojas, Kola Bokinni as Isaac McAdoo and James Lance as Trent Crimm are all absent from Season 4.
The show is not bringing its entire ensemble back. It is keeping the emotional core and building a new supporting structure around the women’s team.
The New Cast Members
Joining the ensemble for Season 4 are Tanya Reynolds, best known for Sex Education. Jude Mack from I Hate Suzie.
Faye Marsay from Andor. Rex Hayes, Aisling Sharkey from Heirs of the Night, and Abbie Hern from My Lady Jane.
These new additions will primarily populate the women’s team that Ted is coaching, the show’s new central ensemble alongside the returning core cast.
Reynolds in particular has built a strong comedic reputation and her addition suggests the show is prioritizing character-driven humor in building out the new team dynamic.
Grant Feely, who takes over as Henry Lasso, rounds out the new additions. Feely is a young actor who made an impression playing young Luke Skywalker in Obi-Wan Kenobi and now inherits one of the show’s most emotionally significant recurring roles.
How ‘Ted Lasso’ Got Revived
Season 3 of Ted Lasso ended in 2023 with Ted choosing to return to Kansas City to be with his son Henry.
At the time, Sudeikis described the season as “the end of the story that we wanted to tell, that we were hoping to tell, that we loved to tell.”
The language was definitive enough that when revival speculation began, most people assumed it would not happen.
Apple TV ordered a fourth season in March 2025, ending roughly two years of speculation.
In January 2026, Apple confirmed the core cast would be returning and the show would premiere in summer 2026.
Hannah Waddingham had been saying publicly for months that the team was targeting an August premiere. The August 5 date confirms she was right.
Sudeikis confirmed his own return on the New Heights podcast hosted by Travis and Jason Kelce, a choice of venue that reflects the show’s place in sports culture as much as television culture.
Ted Lasso began as a soccer show and became something considerably broader, but the audience it built among sports fans has always been part of its identity.
The revival’s creative team is substantial. Jack Burditt executive produces alongside Sudeikis, Hunt, Joe Kelly, Jane Becker, Jamie Lee, Bill Wrubel, Goldstein, Leann Bowen, Bill Lawrence, Jeff Ingold and Liza Katzer.
Goldstein and Bowen are also writers, alongside Sarah Walker and Phoebe Walsh.
The Significance Of Ted Lasso
Ted Lasso is one of the most decorated comedies in Emmy history. The series accumulated 61 Primetime Emmy Award nominations across three seasons.
Season 1 became the most Emmy-nominated comedy series of all time. The show won Outstanding Comedy Series in its first two seasons. Sudeikis, Goldstein, Waddingham and guest star Sam Richardson all took home acting Emmys.
The show arrived during the COVID pandemic and became one of the defining cultural experiences of that period, a series about radical kindness and choosing to believe in people who have stopped believing in themselves, arriving at a moment when that argument needed to be made as compellingly as possible.
Its reputation has only grown in the three years since Season 3 ended.
What Season 4 asks is whether that spirit translates to a new team and a new premise, with a cast that is partly familiar and partly new, on a story that was seeded but never developed.
The women’s football angle gives the show a fresh source of material and a new set of characters to build.
The core cast gives it the emotional continuity that made the first three seasons work.
The specific tension of a women’s second division team in England, underfunded, underestimated, facing exactly the kind of backwards thinking that the wanker in the alley represents, is the kind of underdog story the show has always been best at telling.
The answer to whether it works begins August 5 on Apple TV.
