The latest episode of Ted Lasso brings AFC Richmond's women into one of soccer's oldest problems: the locker room clique. It is a small-seeming shift in the show, but it changes the stakes inside the team at once.
That is why viewers are looking at Ted now. The series has already worked through divorce, egos, bullying, relegation, panic attacks, promotion and Jamie Tartt over its previous three seasons, but this week it lands on something that feels more ordinary and harder to fix. Dr. Sharon Fieldstone puts the problem in blunt terms: if coaches lose the dressing room, they lose the team.
Her point is simple. Successful teams are happy teams, and happy teams depend on coaches who build communication and trust. Most of that culture is created in the dressing room, where players sort out status, comfort and loyalty long before they step on the field. A locker room can hold a 16-year-old rookie midfielder next to a 35-year-old defender at the end of her career. It can put a player fighting for her next contract beside a national team star earning far more in salary and endorsements. International players may arrive without speaking the language, former college and youth teammates may reconnect, and players who spent years as rivals may still dislike each other. In that mix, cliques do not need much help to form.
That is not a theory drawn from one fictional team. A study published in The Sport Psychologist, based on interviews with 18 collegiate athletes across nine teams, found that athletes considered clique formation inevitable. Age, tenure, proximity and similarity all helped decide who drifted toward whom. In other words, the team itself is already doing the math before anyone has named the divide. Even a show that has spent years making sport feel warm and redemptive has now run into one of the least romantic parts of the game.
The friction is that cliques are common, yet they do not always destroy a team. The 2015 and 2019 U.S. women’s national teams both won World Cup titles despite the same forces pulling at the group. Carli Lloyd said in 2022 that even within that squad, the culture had changed. She called the last several years really tough and challenging, and said, “To be quite honest, I hated it.” She added, “It wasn’t fun going in,” and said she was there only for love of the game. Lloyd also said, “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's words matter because they show what a clique problem looks like when it hardens inside a winning environment. She and Hope Solo both described themselves as black sheep within the group, which is exactly how a dressing room becomes two or three smaller rooms. Once that happens, the fix is not talent. It is structure. Fieldstone's answer is to give the team a common enemy, something outside the group that forces players to see themselves as one unit instead of separate camps.
That idea carries its own risk. A common enemy can sharpen purpose, but it can also only work if the team already believes it has something worth protecting together. The 2015 U.S. women turned their attention toward U.S. Soccer after their World Cup victory, and that collective fight gave the group a new center of gravity. AFC Richmond's women have not reached that point yet, and the show has not said what enemy, if any, will pull them together. For now, the most important fact is the one the episode has already put on the table: the team's challenge is not whether cliques exist, but whether the people in the room can still decide to act like one team.
