Spoiler alert: This article contains spoilers for this week’s episode of Ted Lasso.
Across three seasons, Ted Lasso has faced divorce, egos, bullying, relegation, panic attacks, promotion and Jamie Tartt. In the latest episode of season 4, AFC Richmond’s women’s team introduces him to a different challenge: locker-room cliques.
Cliques are common in soccer. At their worst, they can fracture a team and undermine a coach’s authority.
As Dr. Sharon Fieldstone, Ted’s fictional psychologist, explains to former Richmond reporter Trent Crimm on his podcast, if coaches “lose the dressing room, they lose the team.”
“Successful teams are happy teams, and happy teams have coaches that establish a culture of communication and trust,” she says. “The majority of that happens in the dressing room.”
Why soccer teams form cliques
Cliques exist at nearly every level of soccer, from youth teams to professional sides and championship-winning squads such as the 2015 and 2019 United States women’s national teams.
“Even within our squad, the culture has changed,” former U.S. forward Carli Lloyd said on an episode of Hope Solo’s now-defunct podcast recorded in 2022, several months after Lloyd retired as one of the team’s all-time leading scorers. Lloyd and Solo were roommates and close friends during the 2015 World Cup.
“It was really tough and challenging to play these last several years. To be quite honest, I hated it. It wasn’t fun going in. It was only for love of the game, really, for me. I wanted to win and wanted to help the team, but the culture within the team was the worst I had ever seen it.”
Lloyd and Solo similarly considered themselves “black sheep” within the group.
Expecting 26 players to become best friends simply because they wear the same jersey is unrealistic. Every player arrives in a locker room with a different history, set of relationships, loyalties and level of influence.
A 16-year-old rookie midfielder might sit next to a 35-year-old defender nearing the end of her career. A player competing for her next contract might share a locker room with a national team star earning significantly more through salary and endorsements. International players may arrive without speaking the local language, while former college and youth teammates reconnect. Other players may actively dislike one another after years as rivals.
A study published in The Sport Psychologist, based on interviews with 18 collegiate athletes across nine teams, found that athletes viewed clique formation as “inevitable.” Age, tenure, proximity and similarity all influenced which players gravitated toward one another.
How a shared goal can unite a team
So how can a coach stop cliques from destroying a team? Dr. Fieldstone’s answer to Crimm is simple: give the players a common enemy. When the divisions inside a locker room matter less than an external threat, a team can unite around a goal larger than itself.
One of the clearest examples comes from the U.S. women’s national teams that won back-to-back World Cup titles in 2015 and 2019. Those squads featured enormous personalities, but the players ultimately found something more powerful than their competing celebrity: they got angry.
The 2015 World Cup victory was followed by one of the most consequential collective fights in women’s sports. The players turned their attention to U.S. Soccer and what they viewed as systemic inequality in pay, travel, playing conditions and treatment.
In March 2016, Lloyd, Solo, Alex Morgan, Becky Sauerbrunn and Megan Rapinoe filed an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint alleging wage discrimination against U.S. Soccer.
Sauerbrunn explained at the time that the entire team had agreed to the complaint. The five players had been elected by their teammates to represent them in collective bargaining, which made them the names attached to the filing.
Players with different personalities, ideologies and levels of fame suddenly shared one objective: equal pay. The fight was bigger than the cliques.
That collective effort continued into the next generation. By the 2019 World Cup, Solo was no longer in goal, but many players from the 2015 squad remained. The dispute with U.S. Soccer had escalated, with 28 USWNT players filing a gender-discrimination lawsuit just months before the tournament. They ultimately won.
The U.S. women’s national team is hardly the only group to discover that getting everyone to pull in the same direction is easier said than done. But when it works, the result can be powerful.
What England’s Lionesses learned about team unity
Arsenal and England captain Leah Williamson served as an authenticity consultant for the fourth season of Ted Lasso, answering writers’ questions about women’s football during production. It is unclear which elements of the show she directly advised on, but Williamson has experienced both a club team that overcame reported locker-room rifts when Arsenal won the UEFA Champions League and a national team facing significant outside pressure before the 2025 European Championship.
Ahead of the 2025 Euros, England goalkeeper Mary Earps abruptly retired from international football, while defender Millie Bright withdrew from selection because of mental and physical burnout. Neither player was necessarily part of coach Sarina Wiegman’s planned starting lineup, despite their successful legacies with the team.
When major personalities leave a locker room, the team’s internal dynamics change. England nevertheless overcame early tournament struggles to win a second European title. Wiegman’s explanation for the success was: “B****** get s*** done.”
For the U.S. women, the shared cause was equal pay. For the Lionesses, it was silencing the doubters. For AFC Richmond’s women, it is trivia and a good old-fashioned pub fight against misogynistic hecklers at the Crown & Anchor.
Because sometimes team unity is not about being friends. It’s about getting s*** done.