Ted Lasso - Season 4, Episode 5, "Riches of Embarrassment" - Recap & Review
- Jimmy Palmquist
- 3 minutes ago
- 5 min read
⚠️ Spoiler Alert: This review may contains spoilers. ⚠️
Ted Lasso Season 4, Episode 5 Review: “Riches of Embarrassment” Shows Just How Far Ted’s Influence Has Spread.
Ted Lasso Season 4, Episode 5, “Riches of Embarrassment,” feels like classic Ted Lasso in the best possible way. It’s funny, heartfelt, occasionally bizarre, and ultimately optimistic even when almost everything goes wrong. More importantly, this episode gives us one of our clearest looks yet at just how much Ted himself has grown.
And, surprisingly, Nate the Great plays a part in that realization. No, Nate doesn’t suddenly walk through the door. Instead, Ted finds himself confronting a situation that feels awfully familiar.
Coach Alice has continually struggled to embrace Ted’s approach to coaching the Lady Greyhounds. While Ted tries to build his players up, Alice repeatedly tears them down with negativity. There’s obviously a place for criticism in sports, but Alice’s approach is beginning to work directly against what Ted is trying to establish.
And Ted recognizes it.
What I loved about this storyline is that Ted doesn’t simply smile his way through the problem. He acts. Ted suspends Alice for one game and literally references his experience with Nate when explaining his decision.
It’s a wonderful callback, but it also demonstrates something important: Ted learned from what happened with Nate.
Ted Lasso has grown as a person and as a coach.
The centerpiece of “Riches of Embarrassment” is AFC Richmond’s match against Chelsea, and Keeley has pulled off something incredible. She sold out the stadium!
Okay, the tickets were offered at a greatly reduced price, but who cares? A sellout is a sellout, and Keeley deserves enormous credit for finding a way to generate interest in the Lady Greyhounds.
Unfortunately, Keeley discovers there’s a pretty substantial difference between selling every seat and actually having someone sitting in every seat. When match day arrives, the stadium is painfully empty. It’s devastating for Keeley because she clearly takes the failure personally. But one of my favorite moments of the entire episode comes later when she apologizes to the players for the disappointing turnout.
Their reaction is basically: Are you kidding? That was more people than we've ever played in front of. It was amazing.
For these women, this is still a significantly larger crowd than they normally get.
And leave it to my favorite Lady Greyhound, goalkeeper Katie “Boots” Quinn, to deliver one of the episode’s best pieces of advice.
"Those voices in your head, tell them to shut the fuck up, all right." Well said.
That’s Ted’s philosophy coming from someone other than Ted.
And that may be the most important development of the entire season.
Ted’s positivity is spreading.
Unfortunately, there isn’t much positivity to be found during the first half against Chelsea. Richmond is terrible. Somehow, despite how poorly they play, they enter halftime only down two goals.
Then we get what we’ve been waiting for. A great Ted Lasso halftime speech.
Ted lights a fire under the Lady Greyhounds, and suddenly we see a completely different team emerge for the second half. They battle back and somehow manage to tie the game.
For a moment, it feels like we’re about to get the storybook ending.
Then Richmond loses in the final minutes on a deflected own goal.
And you know what?
It almost doesn’t matter.
Of course winning matters. This is still sports. But the result isn’t really what this match is about. We’re watching a team discover who they are.
Earlier this season, I struggled to connect with many of these new players. Episode by episode, however, that is beginning to change. We’re seeing personalities emerge, relationships develop, and most importantly, Ted’s philosophy slowly becoming part of the culture.
That’s what made the original AFC Richmond so special.
We may be watching it happen all over again.
Meanwhile, Matthijs arrives with his daughter Jelka to stay with Rebecca, and he brings some enormous news with him.
But is he telling Rebecca everything?
Rebecca understandably starts digging for answers. Unfortunately, her investigation doesn’t exactly go according to plan, and instead of uncovering whatever she thinks Matthijs may be hiding, she succeeds primarily in breaking his trust.
With the Matthijs situation and the stress surrounding the Lady Greyhounds, Rebecca could use some emotional support.
Enter Zelda.
Her solution?
Alcohol.
Lots of it.
Watching Zelda help Rebecca get drunk while Rebecca deals with everything happening around her provides some wonderful comedy amid the episode’s heavier storylines.
Then there’s Coach Beard.
We finally get some answers about what has been happening with Beard and Jane, and somehow the explanation is simultaneously surprising and exactly what you would expect.
Jane has created a one-woman show.
Of course she has.
Even better, the boys from the pub have already seen it, and their description is enough to convince Ted and Beard that they absolutely have to experience this thing themselves.
What follows is completely insane.
We see pieces of Jane’s performance, and even judged against Jane standards, this thing is crazy. But one thing is unmistakable. Jane is completely in control.
Afterward, Beard finally meets up with her.
He gets wrecked.
It’s weird.
It’s uncomfortable.
It’s Beard and Jane.
What else were we expecting?
We also get another small but intriguing development between Roy and Keeley.
Roy is getting close to completing his ten dates, and Keeley seems very interested in whether he reaches that goal.
There’s just one little complication.
Roy admits that his last four dates have all been with the same woman.
Well, now things are getting interesting.
The Roy/Keeley storyline has been moving slowly in the background, but that revelation adds exactly the kind of wrinkle necessary to make things complicated again. Keeley may be discovering that Roy actually moving forward is a little different from the hypothetical version she had imagined.
What I loved most about “Riches of Embarrassment” is how much it reminded me of Ted Lasso at its best.
Things don't necessarily go well.
Richmond sells out the stadium, but the seats are still empty.
Rebecca tries to uncover the truth and damages Matthijs’s trust.
The Lady Greyhounds mount an incredible comeback and still lose.
Beard reunites with Jane and...well...whatever the hell that was happens.
Yet somehow, the episode still feels overwhelmingly positive.
That’s Ted Lasso.
More importantly, Ted’s philosophy is no longer confined to Ted. We hear it in Boots comforting Keeley. We see it in the players recognizing what Keeley accomplished rather than focusing on the empty seats. We see it in the Lady Greyhounds refusing to collapse after an awful first half.
And we even see it evolving within Ted himself.
His confrontation with Alice proves Ted has learned something from Nate. Optimism doesn’t mean ignoring problems. Forgiveness doesn’t mean refusing to establish boundaries. And believing in people doesn’t mean allowing their behavior to hurt everyone around them.
The original AFC Richmond eventually learned those lessons.
Now the Lady Greyhounds are learning them too.
“Riches of Embarrassment” may be my favorite episode of Season 4 so far because, more than anything else this season, it feels like the Ted Lasso I fell in love with. The jokes are there. The weirdness is definitely there. But underneath everything is that familiar belief that losing doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve failed, people can change, and a little positivity can spread much farther than you ever expected.
The Lady Greyhounds may have lost to Chelsea.
But Ted Lasso is starting to win them over.
Check out the trailer for Season 4 of Ted Lasso:
