After a three-year break, Ted Lasso is back. And this time around, the much-loved Midwesterner is facing a fresh challenge: managing AFC Richmond’s newly formed women’s team.

Announced in March last year, the return of the show about the happy-go-lucky coach took fans (and cast members) by surprise. Given the huge success of the initial three-series run, however, it shouldn't come as a shock that Apple TV was keen for more.

But how did a skit created for NBC become a record-breaking hit for a rival streaming service?

Ted Lasso has an unconventional origin story. Its relentlessly upbeat protagonist was dreamed up more than a decade before series one aired, when co-creators Jason Sudeikis, Brendan Hunt and Joe Kelly became obsessed with playing Fifa while performing together in a comedy troupe in the early 2000s.

In 2013, they introduced Lasso to the world – but he didn’t make his TV debut in a full series, or even a pilot. Instead, the coach featured in skits for NBC, which had recently acquired the US broadcast rights for the Premier League.

The ads saw the hapless but hopeful American football coach Lasso landing a job managing Tottenham Hotspur, and swiftly being schooled on how “soccer” actually works. The campaign was a huge success: the videos garnered millions of views on YouTube and social media, while NBC scored a loyal audience for its (British) football coverage.

But Sudeikis wasn’t quite ready to bid farewell to Lasso and, at the urging of his then-wife Olivia Wilde, began to figure out how he could build a series around the character. Sudeikis, Hunt and Kelly put their heads together in 2015, writing a pilot episode and an outline for a full first season that included a fleshed-out, emotional backstory for Lasso, who was also stripped of his most abrasive tendencies. Two years then passed before Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence came on board, and another two years before Apple TV commissioned series one.

Released in August 2020, Ted Lasso fast became one of the streamer’s biggest hits. In a four-star review, The Independent’s critic Ed Cumming wrote of season one: “Lasso’s boundless optimism, in the face of so many different shades of cynicism, slowly wins us over. He’s not a total ingenue, either, and has enough spine to give the episodes texture.”

The debut series was nominated for 20 Emmy Awards – the most nods ever received by a first-season comedy – and won Outstanding Comedy Series, with Sudeikis taking home the Best Actor in a Comedy Series accolade, while Brett Goldstein, who plays captain-turned-assistant-manager Roy Kent, won in the supporting actor category.

As the initial run became a word-of-mouth hit, its lesser-known stars were rocketed to new levels of fame too. After years of edging towards the spotlight with numerous theatre roles and appearances in the likes of Game of Thrones and Sex Education, Hannah Waddingham finally found herself on the path towards icon status thanks to her star turn as the club’s owner, Rebecca Welton. Likewise, fellow Brit (and future Celebrity Traitors finalist) Nick Mohammed received international recognition for his portrayal of underappreciated kitman, Nate Shelley.

A second season was unsurprisingly commissioned but, of course, with huge success comes a backlash. While Ted Lasso has won praise for tackling themes such as mental health and panic attacks between the sunnier moments, its overridingly twee, optimistic vibe isn’t for everyone.

The show became shorthand for having a slightly embarrassing taste in telly, and provided a punchline in HBO’s The White Lotus, as Aubrey Plaza’s cynical character Harper deadpanned “I don’t watch Ted Lasso” after it was talked up by her husband’s excessively positive friends. Season three, released in 2023, then proved divisive, with some critics unhappy with “bloated” episode runtimes, uneven pacing and perhaps overly detailed character arcs.

With its final episode titled “So Long, Farewell”, the third series of Sudeikis’s comedy was previously billed as the last-ever and saw Lasso leaving the UK behind and returning to Kansas to coach his son’s team.

Now though, he’s back. And the timing of Ted Lasso’s return couldn’t be more perfect. Premiering on Apple TV this week, series four comes midway through a football-heavy summer and just weeks after the end of the 2026 World Cup. The final even provided a perfect promotional opportunity, as Sudeikis and Hunt appeared in character during the Super Bowl-inspired halftime show.

Its switch to women’s football means there were uncomfortable conversations to be had, with Sudeikis taking on the unenviable task of making “very difficult” phone calls to actors who had played the men’s team, letting them know their services would no longer be required.

“Because I didn’t want them to hear it on the internet,” the Saturday Night Live alum told The Hollywood Reporter. “And because I love those guys and we all went through something together.”

Season four will both celebrate the women’s game and explore the realities that come with it; charting gender pay disparity, media coverage, and the players’ fight to juggle their careers and personal lives.

It’s a move that Sudeikis hopes will have a real-world impact. “I hope that people who didn’t know much about soccer, or didn’t really understand it, care about it, or were simply curious, found their way into the game,” he told Press Association.

“The anecdotal evidence we’ve been hearing is that people have embraced the men’s game, and hopefully, through this season, the women’s game as well.”

Ted Lasso season four premieres on Apple TV on Wednesday 5 August.