Maybe the fourth season of Ted Lasso is finally beginning to answer the question I have been asking since the show returned: where is that old magic, the one that made even its most difficult conflicts find some kind of comfort, hope, or possibility of change? After the third episode, I am beginning to think the answer is that the magic has not exactly disappeared. It has simply found an opponent that is much harder to defeat. This time, there is no Jamie Tartt who can mature, no Roy Kent who can lower his guard, no Rebecca who can realize what she is doing and change course. The problem facing AFC Richmond’s women’s team does not necessarily depend on anyone acting in bad faith, because it is built into the system itself. And perhaps that is precisely why it feels so much harder to overcome.

Women’s football presents Ted with a challenge unlike anything he faced when he first arrived at Richmond. No matter how toxic the environment around the men’s team was, the stadium, the supporters, the sponsors, the money, the infrastructure, the trained players and an entire industry ready to sustain that team’s existence were already there. The women arrive having to justify every one of those things before they have even stepped onto the pitch. Episode 3 turns that difference into its central storyline and shows that nobody has to consciously want them to fail for everything around them to make failure more likely.

Keeley feels this most brutally because she is trying to make the new team financially viable. She faces uninterested shareholders, wary sponsors and a structure that demands results before providing even the minimum conditions necessary to achieve them. The investors’ meeting makes the problem almost painfully explicit: when it is time to discuss the women, interest fades, Higgins has produced a pessimistic report about the project’s financial prospects and sponsors begin to pull away. The women’s team has to prove that it can make money before it has played a single match, inside a system that then uses its lack of history as an argument for withholding investment.

It is a vicious and very familiar circle. There is no money because supposedly there is no audience; there is no audience because there is little investment and little exposure; there is no investment because there are not enough results yet; and there are no results because nobody has provided comparable conditions in which to produce them. What Ted Lasso is showing, then, goes far beyond the difficulty of building a new team. It is structural sabotage at work without the need for a villain to announce that women should not be playing football.

That is why the mix-up with the uniforms stops being merely a logistical joke. The Richmond players are about to play their first match and simply have nothing to wear. Roy, trying to help Keeley, makes one of those mistakes that makes the episode especially uncomfortable precisely because he means no harm. He loves Keeley, wants to support her and genuinely believes that he is doing so. When he tries to calm her down by saying that, after all, it is only a friendly, he does not understand the weight of what he has just said.

Keeley’s reaction is the most important moment of the episode because it dismantles that seemingly harmless idea. In men’s football, perhaps a friendly really can be just a friendly, an inconsequential match in a preparation period that will be forgotten once the serious competition begins. For these women, that possibility does not exist. Every match is also an evaluation of their right to exist. Every mistake can be used as evidence that there is no audience, no financial return, not enough talent or no reason to keep investing. They are not simply stepping onto the field to play football. They are trying to prove that they deserve money, supporters, infrastructure, broadcasts, uniforms and a future.

The series is particularly effective in putting that kind of mistake in Roy’s mouth because he is very far from the caricature of a consciously sexist man. Roy respects women, loves Keeley, is deeply attached to Phoebe and has changed enormously over the course of the series. And yet he carries a kind of prejudice he does not recognize in himself because he grew up inside a logic in which “football” automatically meant men’s football. The same thing happens when Phoebe says she wants to watch Richmond and he asks which Richmond she means, as though there were an automatic distinction between the “real” team and the women’s side. For Phoebe, the question makes no sense. They are both Richmond. Perhaps it is precisely the simplicity of that answer that makes the scene so revealing.

While Keeley faces the financial resistance, Ted and Beard run into another practical consequence of inequality. With the opening match approaching, they still need to fill places in the squad and discover that there simply is not the same abundance of available players they would expect in the men’s game. And here Ted Lasso once again shows how well it understands music by choosing I Hope I Get It, the song that opens A Chorus Line, to accompany the auditions.

The choice is brilliant because A Chorus Line is itself a story about people competing for the smallest chance to occupy the stage. The musical grew out of the real experiences of Broadway dancers and follows an audition in which dozens of performers compete for only a handful of places in the chorus of a show. They will not be the stars, their names will not be above the title and, for much of the audience, they will simply be the figures filling the background of the stage. And yet getting one of those jobs means everything. It means work, survival, belonging and the possibility of continuing to do what they have devoted their lives to.

That is why I Hope I Get It works so perfectly as the opening number. Before the glamour, the applause or the finished show, there is only the anxiety of desperately hoping to be chosen. The song lives inside that moment when every gesture can decide the future: I hope I get it, I hope somebody sees me, I hope this time they say yes. When Ted Lasso uses it during the women’s trials, a potentially comic sequence becomes something much more meaningful. These players, too, are fighting for a small place inside a structure that has historically reserved almost the entire stage for men.

There is also a wonderful irony in the connection to A Chorus Line. In the musical, there are too many candidates for too few places. At Richmond, the problem is almost the reverse: there are so few players with enough experience and preparation that Ted and Beard struggle to complete the squad. Not because women lack talent or interest in football, obviously, but because for decades there have been fewer teams, fewer youth systems, less investment, fewer professional opportunities and therefore far fewer routes through which that talent could be developed.

Alice understands this more pragmatically than Ted and becomes a necessary counterpoint to the method that has always been at the heart of the series. When he wants to bet on personality, potential and that old intuition that a person can become something more if someone believes in them, Alice reminds him that women’s football cannot be treated as charity. Women do not need kind men to give them an opportunity out of generosity. They need to be treated as professional athletes and judged accordingly. Equality does not mean lowering the standards. It means providing conditions that are at least remotely equivalent so that those standards can fairly exist.

And then comes Susan Boyle, perhaps the most precise musical reference in the entire episode. For anyone who no longer remembers the scale of that phenomenon, it is worth going back to 2009. Susan Boyle was 47 when she walked onto the stage of Britain’s Got Talent. Scottish, unknown, plainly dressed and with a shy manner that had almost nothing in common with television’s conventional image of a star, she was greeted with a kind of skepticism that is uncomfortable to watch in retrospect. Before she even sang, the audience and judges seemed to have decided who this woman was and, more importantly, who she could never be.

Then Susan Boyle began singing I Dreamed a Dream, from Les Misérables, and within seconds that perception collapsed. The performance became a worldwide phenomenon because it captured something that was both moving and deeply uncomfortable: millions of people watched a woman being judged before she had opened her mouth, and then watched that judgment disintegrate in the face of a talent that had been there all along. When Ted returns to that audition in the episode, the connection with the Lady Greyhounds is unavoidable. Investors, sponsors and even people who want to help them have already formed an opinion before seeing them play. They, too, have to survive the judgment before being granted the right to show what they can do.

But the choice of I Dreamed a Dream is even richer because Ted Lasso is not working only with the story of Susan Boyle. It is also working with Fantine and with the original meaning of the song in Les Misérables. This is not, after all, an optimistic anthem about chasing dreams and believing everything will work out. Fantine sings it after brutally discovering what reality has done to everything she once imagined for her life. She remembers youth, innocence, the time when she believed in love and looked at the future with tenderness. Then she looks at the present and understands that hope has been crushed by poverty, abandonment, and a society determined to punish her.

That is exactly why the reference is so precise. The season is not simply telling women to dream and believe that the world will eventually open itself to them. It is showing almost the opposite: they dream of something that should be as basic as playing football under conditions comparable to those enjoyed by men and discover that the path has been made harder from the beginning. Keeley believes she can build a team, Rebecca believes she can finance it, Ted believes he can coach it, and the players believe they can finally occupy that pitch, while the world around them keeps reminding them, step by step, that turning that dream into reality costs much more when the structure was never designed for you.

Perhaps that is also the explanation for the uncomfortable sense that the jokes this season are not landing with the same lightness as before. It is not necessarily that Ted Lasso has forgotten how to be funny. The problem is that the drama it has chosen is so real that many of the jokes collide with something that cannot be easily transformed into comfort. When Roy gets it wrong while trying to help, for example, we are not watching a funny eccentricity but a well-meaning man reproducing exactly the kind of thinking the season wants to question. That makes the episode less comfortable and perhaps deliberately less charming.

Rebecca is living that tension on another level. Building the women’s project is taking up more and more space in her life and interfering with her attempt to keep her relationship with Matthijs alive. Plans are postponed, dates are compromised, and work once again begins swallowing important parts of Rebecca’s personal life, which connects directly with the way she has always existed inside Richmond: when something matters to her, she gives herself to it completely.

That said, I need to get something off my chest because I remain deeply suspicious of this pilot. Ever since Matthijs appeared in Season 3 and “helped” Rebecca after she fell into the canal in Amsterdam, something about him has felt strange to me. I am not even talking about the old wish to see Rebecca and Ted together anymore, because for me that ship has sailed. Their relationship remains intimate, beautiful and full of affection, but the chemistry seems to have moved quite naturally into an almost familial friendship, without the sexual friction that would sustain another direction.

My problem with Matthijs is something else. He is too understanding, too patient and always seems to arrive as exactly the perfect man Rebecca was supposedly waiting to meet. Perhaps that is all it is, of course: the series may simply be showing that she is finally emotionally ready for a healthy, adult relationship without games of power or suffering. Still, in a show that has spent years teaching us to look beneath appearances, I continue to find this man just a little too perfect not to raise an eyebrow. I may be completely wrong, but for now I remain deeply suspicious of that pilot.

What matters most, however, is that the third episode finally makes the season’s real opponent easier to see. Ted was able to transform a broken men’s dressing room because, despite all its problems, that dressing room already had permission to exist. The Lady Greyhounds have to earn that permission every single day. It is not enough for them to believe in themselves. They have to convince shareholders, find sponsors, secure uniforms, build a squad, attract an audience, win matches and keep proving their value knowing that any defeat may be interpreted not merely as a defeat, but as evidence that the entire project should never have existed in the first place.

That is why I Hope I Get It and I Dreamed a Dream form a kind of musical structure for the episode. The first is about people begging for the opportunity to occupy even a small place on the stage. The second is about the moment when a seemingly simple dream collides with a reality capable of crushing it. Between those two songs stand the women of Richmond, trying to enter a game that should always have belonged to them too.

Perhaps, then, the old Ted Lasso magic has not disappeared at all. What has changed is that, this time, the series has chosen to ask whether believing is really enough when the entire system around you has been built to make it much harder for some people to turn that belief into reality.