Ted Lasso Episode 36: Curiouser and Curiouser!

Ted returns to Richmond to begin coaching the women’s team, and his first day immediately shows how under-resourced the operation is: the team’s facilities are cramped, the staff dynamic is tense, and Ted is quickly told that his assistant coach, Alice Chilton, is planning to resign after being passed over for the head coach job.

Back at the club, Rebecca is dealing with a report on whether the women’s team can even be sustained, while Keeley pushes to find the team better accommodations. When Rebecca turns down the budget for a new locker room, Keeley instead secures permission to use the visitors’ locker room so the women do not have to keep sharing the academy space.

Ted meets the players and starts learning their personalities and needs. The team includes a striker named Josie, twin defenders Niamh and Siobhan, and a goalkeeper called Boots, who is talented but cannot get serious interest from clubs because she refuses to wear gloves. During a press conference, Ted is frustrated when the questions focus more on the men’s team than on the women he has just been hired to coach.

Ted also reconnects with familiar faces around the club, including Roy, while Beard is unable to help much because of obligations tied to the men’s side. His easygoing style clashes with Alice’s blunt, irritated manner, and she makes clear that she is not impressed by him.

As training continues, the episode shows Ted trying to settle in with the new squad and their limited resources, while the larger uncertainty around the team hangs over the club. The situation becomes more serious when Josie suffers a major injury during training, and Alice goes with her to the hospital. The injury ends Josie’s season, underscoring how fragile the team’s situation is.

On Alice’s final day, Ted reveals the team’s new locker room, giving the players a much better space than they had before. He also privately tells Alice that he researched her background and learned that she had experienced a similar injury that ended her playing career and pushed her toward coaching. That conversation reframes her hard edge as something rooted in her own experience, even though the episode keeps that information confined to what Ted learns here.

Elsewhere, Rebecca and Higgins discuss the bleak financial outlook for the women’s team and the possibility that supporting it could even complicate investment in the men’s side as well.