SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for the Season 4 finale of “Ted Lasso,” now streaming on Apple TV.

There’s a new coach at AFC Richmond, and it’s not Ted Lasso. The Season 4 finale of “Ted Lasso,” titled “The Departing Lass,” ended with Ted (Jason Sudeikis) handing the AFC Richmond’s women’s team manager job to Alice Chilton (Tanya Reynolds), while he demotes himself to assistant manager alongside Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt).

Alice is ready for the challenge, having been instrumental in the team’s rise. And at the same time, it turns out Ted has been thinking about his father lately — who died by suicide when Ted was just 16 — and realizing that he still has been absent too much for his own son Henry, he knows it’s time for a change.

Meanwhile, there’s also a switchup on the men’s team, as Roy (Brett Goldstein) has been offered — and has accepted — a huge job managing the Chelsea team. But he and Keeley (Juno Temple) are about to have a child, so he has a lot to ponder. Not to be outdone, Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham) proposes marriage to her boyfriend Matthijs (Matteo van der Grijn).

And as the team mourns the death of pub owner Mae (Annette Badland), she winds up saving the day from beyond the grave. That’s because Zelda (Tracey Ullman) is ultimately thwarted in her attempt to buy up a controlling interest in AFC Richmond by Mae’s last will and testament, which gives her shares in the team back to Rebecca — keeping her at 51% ownership.

Oh, and Nate (Nick Mohammad) dropped by to visit Nelson Road — and take part in a reunion of the Diamond Dogs, who are called into duty when Roy asks for advice on being a new dad. And Beard, having gone through some midlife crisis looks this season, got a haircut.

That’s a lot of story, not to mention a new version of the opening theme, now performed by Brandi Carlile.

Hunt, who also serves as an executive producer and writer on “Ted Lasso,” spoke with Variety about the Season 4 finale — including whether there will be a Season 5.

Let’s start by talking about how the season ended. There was a little bit of a fake-out when Roy was leaving, so it seemed like Ted was going to ask Rebecca for that job again. But instead, he was going to ask her about demoting himself. How did that come about?

That was something Jason wanted to happen from the beginning of the writers’ room. He saw Ted stepping down as just kind of fundamental to what the season was going to be. Which is why Episode 1 starts with the close-up of his nametag to “Lasso assistant manager,” and then we land on Ted Lasso as an assistant manager at the end. In terms of the fake-out, yeah, just a tiny little goose for the last moment. For anyone who still thought somehow this was like a side dalliance with the women’s team — “ha, I knew he’d come back” — no, we’re not. We’re quite fond of our women’s team, thank you very much!

We see Ted still feels like he’s not spent enough time with Henry, and that lays the groundwork for him deciding to pull back. What was the discussion in the writers’ room of what Ted’s journey would be this season?

The Henry thing is the main thing. The whole idea of bringing Henry to London this time, he thought in his head, “now I’ll have much more time with Henry” — and it hadn’t worked out that way. He’s missed his games, and especially as he’s reminded by the Employee of the Year plaque that his record-setting father bequeathed him unwittingly. You can be a little too devoted to your work, and it can be deleterious to to your health. He just wants to make sure he’s with Henry more. And then, as a side channel to that, he’s watched Alice grow. She was almost ready when we first met her, and now she’s much more ready. I think he is just ready to be support personnel at this time, and have more of his free time, and see what he can do with it.

Was there ever a thought of letting Zelda actually take over AFC Richmond, perhaps as a cliffhanger for next season?

We definitely thought about every option for that, including, “OK, what would it be if there’s a new boss here that everyone has to deal with, and what would happen?” But in the end, we said, no. This is this is Rebecca’s roost, and she’ll figure this out.

Speaking of cliffhangers, there aren’t too many this season. But there are still some threads to pick up on. What did you want to leave hanging to pick up in Season 5?

There’s not much in the way of cliffhangers. But Ted and Beard as peers instead of hierarchically, I’m curious about that. Roy and Keeley becoming parents, curious about that. Rebecca married, curious about that. The the fellas running the pub, and how’s the team going to take to Alice as their leader? These are all just more like questions than cliffhangers. But also, there’s not yet any indication that we’re going to get to answer those questions. So at the moment, they’re still lingering in the air.

That brings up the key question. What what do you hear about a Season 5? What does Jason want to do in terms of coming back?

He plays the cards close to his chest, and I’m not privy to whatever poker game that I hope is happening between the powers that be. I think we’ve always basically hoped we were coming back for more than one, but if it ends up just being one, then OK, that’s fine. It did end nicely. We’ll just have to see.

We actually saw more of Mae this season, which made what happened at the end of Episode 9 even more impactful. Did Mae have to die for Rebecca to save the team?

We had the notion of, if we are going to lose Mae, then the phrase that kept coming up was, how can Mae save the team from the grave? And so we got ourselves toward that. Shout out to to Annette Badland, who is just so beloved by all of us, and such a trooper. Once Jason told her what was happening, she rolled with it.

But tell me about the decision process of having Mae pass away.

It’s one of the landmarks of life that we go through, and we haven’t exactly gone through it on the show, at least with someone who we know or care about. Like, we never knew Rebecca’s dad, for example, but we were at his funeral. But Mae seemed like the right person for it to be, and then dealing with all the repercussions of it. And then, how can she, in death, just basically save the day.

All right, let’s talk about Beard. He starts wearing color contacts, he changes his hair and starts wearing earrings. How was it decided that he was going to be put through the wringer this season?

Especially by the end of Season 3, we know that yes, Beard has a fairly sturdy facade, but he’s basically always had demons. We learned that really when we went on Beard’s after hours as well. As someone who also has always dealt with his own self-image issues. It’s like you can, in his case, get to the Ted effect. You can like get to as good a place as you can get. But you still have stuff that you’re dealing with, and you need to be dealing with it. And essentially, the Jane situation of being without Ted for so long has just rattled him. That’s left him in a vulnerable position. The point of all that being like, there’s only so much other people can do for you. You have to get yourself to the healthiest place. And he’s just not able to for a while here. And in the aftermath of the Jane stuff, and then when he thinks he’s gonna rise up from that on New Year’s, the gut punch that he takes there. All that is a long-winded way of saying, just a good old-fashioned midlife crisis — but with modern cosmetic choices.

And Richard Schiff plays a version of Beard in Jane’s play!

I love Richard Schiff, and I hope he gets a kick out of that, because I know he watches the show. So that was a very intentional choice to shout out to the legend.

How do you know he watches the show?

We just literally crossed paths at the Emmys one year. The year that I presented with Jane Lynch — and we didn’t even get to talk much. That was the year they were doing all the reunions of old casts, and at one point just crossing to my seat, here comes the whole cast of “The West Wing.” Richard Schiff in particular, was just beaming at me in this warm and wonderful way. It was very clear, like “Oh wow, Richard Schiff digs the show. That’s really great.” So this is our shout out.