Ted Lasso Season 4 Episode 4 Review: The Best Episode Yet

Our Ted Lasso Season 4 Episode 4 review comes down to one word: PRESS X. Spoilers, obviously, and read on for our full thoughts.

Four episodes into this season and the show finally trusts its new characters enough to let them mess up in public. This Ted Lasso Season 4 Episode 4 review has to open with the obvious: it’s the best episode Season 4 has put together so far, and it’s not close.

What Happened in “Greyhounds’ Day Off”

The episode opens on a framing device that’s honestly a little sneaky: Trent Crimm and Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, both mostly absent since the timeskip, show up together on Trent’s podcast, Through the Laces. Sharon’s there to promote her new book on team psychology, and the conversation about “lose the dressing room, lose the team” doubles as the thesis for the whole episode. It’s a clean way to smuggle in two fan-favorites and set the table at the same time.

Back at Richmond, Ted and Beard clock what Sharon just diagnosed from a distance: the women’s team has split into cliques by position, attackers, defenders, midfielders, and nobody’s talking across the lines. The bit where the coaches try to figure out which clique they’d belong to is the kind of low-stakes character comedy this show does better than almost anything else on Apple TV right now.

Meanwhile Keeley and Rebecca are at a £2,000-a-head women’s football business summit to meet Zelda Southport, played by Tracey Ullman, a self-made investor who built her fortune inventing the claw clip before turning her money exclusively toward women’s sports. Zelda’s speech to a room of rich donors, essentially calling out the difference between funding women’s football for the press photo versus actually caring about it, is the episode’s sharpest scene, and Keeley’s visibly rattled reaction to it does more to develop her arc this season than anything since the premiere.

The two threads collide at Mae’s pub quiz night, which escalates from petty trivia into a full standoff against a table of sexist blokes who don’t think the women’s team deserves to be there. It’s the clique-fixing mechanism the coaches were fumbling toward all episode, engineered by the actual plot instead of a locker room speech. The episode closes on Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.” needle-drop as the team leaves united, which is about as on-the-nose as Ted Lasso ever gets, but it earns it.

There’s a smaller Keeley/Roy beat tucked in here too, the show finally acknowledging they’ve been orbiting each other without a real scene together for most of the season, and it’s a promising crack in a dynamic that’s felt frozen since the timeskip.

TL;DR (For The Skippers)

• Trent Crimm and Dr. Sharon Fieldstone are back, framing the episode through Trent’s podcast
• The women’s team is fracturing into position-based cliques; Ted, Beard, and Chilton try to diagnose it
• Zelda Southport (Tracey Ullman), a women’s-sports investor and claw clip inventor, makes her entrance and calls out donors who fund the optics, not the sport
• Keeley and Rebecca’s dynamic gets real texture out of the summit scene
• A pub quiz night turns into a standoff with a table of dismissive men, which is what actually unites the team
• Ends on Queen Latifah’s “U.N.I.T.Y.” as the Greyhounds walk out as one unit
• First real Keeley/Roy scene in a while, small but overdue

As you know, we rate everything on the following scale:

• PRESS X — This is worth your time. Go play it, watch it, whatever the format calls for.
• YOUR CALL — Solid, but not essential. Depends on what you’re looking for.
• SKIP IT — Don’t bother.

The Verdict: PRESS X

This is the episode where Season 4 stops feeling like a soft reboot, and it’s the high point of the season by far. New characters get to be flawed instead of just likable; Zelda in particular lands as a genuinely unique and funny addition rather than a plot device, and the clique structure gives the ensemble something to actually do besides be charming at each other. Four episodes in was about the right time for that shift, and this is the episode that proves it was worth the wait.

You can check out our reviews for the rest of the season here.

AJ Hanson

AJ Hanson has been part of games media since 2011, writing, streaming, and ranting about the industry long before it was his job. He runs the Galaxy’s Edge Discord, the go-to community for fans of Disney’s Star Wars parks, and works as Marketing Director for the Virtual Cantina Network, helping produce shows, interviews, and fan events. A lifelong Star Wars fan and unapologetic nerd, AJ’s focus has always been on building spaces where people can connect, argue, and celebrate the things they love without all the corporate gloss.