Women’s Football Is Giving Main Character Energy – A View From Jaime Bivona, Vice President Octagon Europe
August 17, 2026
Women’s sport does not need Ted Lasso to make it culturally relevant, writes Jaime Bivona.
As Ted Lasso turns to a women’s team, the real milestone is not simply that women’s football is being represented on screen. It is that the women’s game is being trusted to entertain a mainstream audience on its own terms, without having to justify its existence.
On 5th August, Ted Lasso returned with Season 4 of what Apple describes as Ted’s ‘biggest challenge yet’: coaching a second-division women’s football team. One of television’s most recognisable sporting worlds has placed the women’s game at the centre of its next chapter.
At first glance, the symbolism writes itself. Women’s football has become sufficiently mainstream to inherit one of the most successful sporting franchises on television. However, that interpretation is too easy.
The more revealing question is not whether women’s football can be featured in a hit show. It is whether the women’s game can become the central story that keeps a mainstream audience watching. That distinction separates representation from narrative power.
From permission to proof
When Bend It Like Beckham was released in 2002, football functioned as the place where Jess (the film’s protagonist) negotiated permission: from her family, from cultural expectations and from a sporting system that did not expect her to belong.
The film’s story was far richer than football alone, but the game represented freedom. Seeing girls play still felt disruptive, which is why the BFI and other major film platforms credit the film with making a significant contribution to the cultural footprint of women’s football in the UK.
The years that followed did not lack women’s football storytelling. However, many of its most prominent screen moments were documentary-led.
LFG examined the US women’s national team’s equal-pay battle. Copa 71 recovered a remarkable chapter of the game’s lost history. Matildas: The World at Our Feet and Under Pressure took audiences inside elite international teams. Angel City and Welcome to Wrexham expanded the conversation to include ownership, business and community.
These productions performed essential cultural work. They gave the game evidence, context and an archive it had long been denied.
But they also placed a particular burden on real women to prove the quality of the sport, expose its inequities, demonstrate its commercial potential or recover the history that others had overlooked.
Women’s football became more visible, but much of its storytelling remained explanatory.
The next threshold is narrative freedom
A category’s cultural maturity should not be measured only by how many people watch it. It should also be measured by how many kinds of stories it’s permitted to tell.
Men’s football can be tragedy, comedy, nostalgia, business, fantasy or farce. Women’s football is still disproportionately expected to inspire, educate or represent progress.
The clearest sign of progress is when women in sport no longer have to be role models first and characters second, but are given the same freedom routinely afforded to men. To be ambitious, difficult, funny, flawed and compelling.
This is why fiction matters. Documentary can show audiences why women’s football deserves attention. Fiction can create characters and worlds they actively want to return to. One builds understanding and respect, and the other builds emotional attachment and fandom.
That’s the opportunity facing Ted Lasso.
Is women’s football getting a franchise, or is a franchise getting women’s football?
We should be careful not to award Ted Lasso cultural significance before fully seeing what it actually does.
Ted remains the central character. The question is whether the players will be given stories and ambitions of their own, or whether the women’s game will primarily provide a fresh backdrop for Ted’s development throughout the season.
Do the players have ambitions, conflicts and relationships? Does the show capture what is culturally distinctive about the women’s game, or simply reproduce familiar men’s football stories with different players? Are its women allowed to be complete characters, or must they carry a message in every scene?
If the series gets this right and the viewer’s response is equal to it, the show could mark a genuine cultural threshold. Otherwise, it risks becoming another form of borrowed legitimacy, where women’s football enters the mainstream through a world still constructed around men.
ts significance will lie not simply in featuring a women’s team, but in how fully it allows the players to shape and drive the story.
This is expansion, not validation
Women’s sport does not need Ted Lasso to make it culturally relevant. It is already shaping fashion, media, fandom and brand behaviour.
What the new season offers is something more specific. A place for women’s football within a form of mainstream storytelling it has rarely occupied at this scale.
The women’s game has commanded live audiences, driven social conversation and inspired powerful documentaries. Now it is being given room inside a global fictional world, with recurring characters, comedy, rivalries and storylines designed to keep a broad audience coming back.
That is why this moment matters. It is not popular culture discovering women’s football. It is women’s football expanding the range of cultural spaces it can occupy.
The patronage era is ending
The same shift represented by Ted Lasso has implications for brands. If women’s football is now being treated as a world capable of driving mainstream entertainment, it should also be treated as a valuable commercial and cultural partner, not simply a cause deserving support.
For years, brands have positioned themselves as champions or supporters of women’s sport. That language made sense when investment and visibility were scarce.
But as more brands adopt the same posture, ‘support’ becomes less distinctive. Belief in the women’s game is becoming the baseline. What a brand meaningfully contributes is the differentiator.
The next generation of partnerships should be judged not by how loudly a brand declares its support, but by what it enables the game to do that it could not do before.
Does it create better products for female players and fans? Open new routes into the game? Support the creators and businesses growing around the sport?
Official sponsorship rights can buy presence. Cultural rights must be earned, and are the informal permission audiences give brands that contribute something credible, useful or entertaining to a community they value. They come through relevance, authorship, utility and reciprocity, not simply contractual entitlement.
After inspiration
Building the next season of Ted Lasso around a women’s team does not mean equality has been achieved. Nor does women’s football need the show to validate its cultural importance. The more revealing point is that mainstream entertainment is now drawing on a world the game has already built, complete with its own stars, fashion trends, rivalries, humour and emotional stakes. This is not arrival but expansion into one of the few cultural spaces women’s football has yet to occupy at this scale.