AFC Richmond is a fictitious English soccer club in the critically acclaimed show “Ted Lasso,” but the inspiration for the plot that follows in the show’s fourth season is real: The Kansas City Current of the NWSL.

The new season’s first episode was filmed over several weeks in Kansas City, with a key scene filmed at CPKC Stadium. There, the main characters watched a Kansas City Current match, which sets up the entire new season with Ted Lasso as coach of the newly created AFC Richmond women’s team.

“It is a little bit proof of concept,” Kansas City Current co-owner Angie Long told ESPN. “Everything that we’ve built, even a show like ‘Ted Lasso’ is seeing it. So, I think it’s endorsement. But again, what it means for sport, for women’s soccer is huge.”

Angie Long said that producers from the Apple TV show approached them in April 2025 and came up with the entire idea. Jason Sudeikis, who plays Lasso in the show, is a superfan of Kansas City and women’s sports — or as Angie Long puts it, he’s more like “a friend of the team” as he has been to multiple Current games.

In the season debut episode of “Ted Lasso,” AFC Richmond’s staff flies to Kansas City to tell Lasso that it is launching a women’s team and it wants him to be the coach. (The plane used by the characters on the show is the Longs’ real-life private plane.) But team owner Rebecca Welton (played by Hannah Waddingham) eventually needs her own inspiration after hearing news of another women’s team folding due to financial troubles.

As doubt over the financial viability of a women’s team appears to creep in, Welton’s mind is changed by the sellout crowd and enthusiasm at CPKC Stadium for the Current. (Most of the fans in the scene are portrayed by Current employees.)

Call it art imitating life: Kansas City is one of the NWSL’s ultimate success stories in the real world. Controlling owners Angie and Chris Long largely funded and built CPKC Stadium, the first stadium built specifically for an NWSL team, a project they started in 2022 on the belief that their investment would pay off.

The team has announced a sellout crowd of 11,500 fans for every league match since the stadium opened in 2024 and is expected to soon expand the stadium to 18,000 seats. Not to mention, a billion-dollar riverfront neighborhood in Kansas City is planned around a women’s soccer stadium.

Women’s sports, including the NWSL, are rapidly growing by most business metrics, but issues like paltry salaries and teams folding existed until recent years. Kansas City had an NWSL team that failed before the Current — the defunct club FC Kansas City — and there was plenty of skepticism when the Longs purchased the franchise and brought an NWSL team back to Kansas City in December 2020.

Season four of “Ted Lasso” begins with reminders of those realities. As Welton gets ready to go to the Current game, AFC Richmond director of football operations Leslie Higgins (played by Jeremy Swift) informs Welton of a rival team in England folding its women’s side due to financial issues. Welton shakes him off and maintains her optimism — at least at first.

“Yes, we shall succeed where others have failed for some unknown reason out there somewhere, somehow,” Higgins says sarcastically in the show.