The fourth season of the critically acclaimed football drama Ted Lasso has taken a surprising twist. The show’s writers have decided to have their hero coach AFC Richmond’s women’s team, testing whether Ted’s “Lasso way” can work in a very different footballing environment. We’re only three episodes in, but I’ve already found myself wondering if the series will showcase what makes the women’s game distinct, or just treat it as the same sport with different characters.

The early signs are promising: we’ve already seen the issue of substandard facilities, initial disinterest from the club’s fanbase and the flak that Coach Chilton gets for exhibiting the same qualities lauded in the men’s coach, Roy Kent.

Watching the show, I found myself thinking about real-life football and asking whether, in growing the women’s game, we can avoid reproducing systems and structures present in its male counterpart.

The classicist Mary Beard says in her book, Women & Power, “You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.” She was writing about women in public life, but her words could be easily applied to football, which remains stubbornly male-dominated.

The typical men’s football club is loss-making and more than half of fans feel that high ticket costs have made the game less enjoyable. Why copy that?

I discovered this reality when I (then an avowed football-disliker) visited Lewes FC in 2017, as........

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