Jason Sudeikis didn't need to invent a women's soccer success story for Ted Lasso's fourth season. He just flew to Kansas City.
The new season of the Apple TV+ show opens with the staff of fictional English club AFC Richmond travelling to Missouri to watch a Kansas City Current match at CPKC Stadium — and what they see there convinces club owner Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) to launch a women's team with Lasso as coach. Life is the pitch, apparently.
Producers approached the Current in April 2025. Sudeikis, a self-described superfan who has attended multiple Current games, is described by co-owner Angie Long less as a celebrity partner and more as "a friend of the team." The cast spent three weeks filming in Kansas City, including an 11-hour shoot day at CPKC Stadium where acted scenes were later spliced with real match footage.
Why Kansas City makes sense as the template
This isn't random product placement. The Current are arguably the NWSL's most compelling franchise story right now. Owners Angie and Chris Long built CPKC Stadium from scratch starting in 2022 — the first stadium ever constructed specifically for an NWSL club — on what was, at the time, a considerable leap of faith. Every league match since the stadium opened in 2024 has sold out at 11,500 fans, and expansion to 18,000 seats is expected soon. There's also a billion-dollar riverfront development planned around the ground.
That context matters for the show too. Season four opens with Higgins delivering the news that a rival English club has folded its women's side. "Yes, we shall succeed where others have failed for some unknown reason out there somewhere, somehow," Jeremy Swift deadpans. It's sardonic, but it lands — because the NWSL has genuinely lived that cycle. Teams have folded, relocated, and been revived. Players earned $6,000 a year when the league started. Kansas City itself had a previous NWSL club, FC Kansas City, that collapsed before the Current were established in December 2020.
The league is now in its 13th season — 16 teams, Manhattan office, franchises valued in the hundreds of millions — but the scars of that earlier era are still recent enough that the show's framing doesn't feel melodramatic.
What this means beyond one episode
Ted Lasso was the most-streamed original show in the United States in 2023 with 16.9 billion minutes watched. It has 61 Primetime Emmy nominations and 13 wins. Three seasons have built an audience that, by and large, has never engaged with professional women's soccer. Season four is a direct pitch to all of them.
Angie Long compared it to the Taylor Swift effect on the NFL. That's optimistic framing, but it's not baseless. The NWSL is heading into a cycle that includes the 2027 Women's World Cup and the 2031 tournament on home soil. Growing the casual audience now, before those events, is exactly the kind of compounding investment the league needs.
- Two-time reigning NWSL MVP Temwa Chawinga appears on screen scoring for the Current
- The Longs' real private plane is used as the AFC Richmond team jet in the show
- Most fans in the stadium scenes are played by Current employees
- The Longs and their daughter Abigail filmed cameo scenes that were cut from the final edit
Chris Long hasn't seen the rest of season four yet, but he's already thinking about what comes next in the plot: the facilities questions, community building, filling stands from zero. "I feel like in many ways, we'll see some other threads that are common to the Kansas City Current," he said.
Swift put it plainest at last month's CPKC Stadium press conference: "What this season goes to address is to try and support women's football financially and with integrity. Because there's a lot of lip service given to it. It needs backing."
