YMMV / Dream Team

• Archive Panic: Ten seasons and a whopping inversion of British Brevity, with 419 episodes in total.
• Broken Base: The series had a major change in Seasons 2 and 3, changing the focus from the youth team to include the first team, eventually dropping the former altogether. While the production values improved considerably, and it led to several memorable storylines, it also led to controversial storytelling choices like Dean becoming a domestic abuser, a plane crash killing multiple characters, and a Loony Fan becoming a premier league player. It's also up in the air whether the Denser and Wackier storytelling was part of the show's charm or not.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The series had an overwhelming popularity in Ireland, due to being one of the shows always on when Sky TV was in its infancy there. The fan site Dream Team Diehard was started by an Irish fan, and the website balls.ie frequently covers it.
• Growing the Beard: Season 2 saw production values improving significantly, the series perfecting the rotoscoping technique to allow for more match scenes.
• Harsher in Hindsight: It's startling how much Philip Barantini's life would parallel Billy's. He admits he was too young to get that famous and have that much money, and most of it was spent on drinking and drugs, and he would be cut from the show because of his behaviour. It would get worse when he dropped out of acting to become a chef, struggling with alcoholism.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The love triangle in Season 1 was Dean being torn between club owner's daughter Georgina and sports broadcaster Lucy. Georgina's actress Clemency Burton-Hill later became a broadcaster herself.
• Jerkass Woobie: Georgina may be a Bratty Teenage Daughter and causes all sorts of trouble in Dean's life, especially when she won't take no for an answer, but then she's the victim of revenge porn, gets chewed out by her father for it, loses him to a heart attack and then also has a miscarriage of the baby that resulted from the tryst with Dean. All before she even turns eighteen.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A significant portion of fans tuned in just for the football scenes, not caring much about the interpersonal drama.
• Narm: After telling Georgina he doesn't want a relationship, Dean has a whole imagination sequence where clips of him keep slowly fading into clips of her like something out of a cheesy 90s music video - which can be right jarring with the show's otherwise grounded Slice of Life tone.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Darren Morfitt is now better remembered as the Ensemble Dark Horse Spoon in Dog Soldiers.
  • Allison King would later be far better known as Carla on Coronation Street.
  • Philip Barantini would be part of Band of Brothers and in the 2020s be better known as a director of the likes of Boiling Point (2021).
• Seasonal Rot: Seasons 7-10 are considered to not be able to match the heights of the previous years. Season 6 was considered the show's peak, and the others couldn't follow. While there were storylines and episodes well-received, including the Grand Finale, the last three seasons are generally an Audience-Alienating Era.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The series is a time capsule of the football scene as it was in the 90s and eventually the 2000s. The choice to have the players rotoscoped into footage of then-current games shows the contemporary kits and and players, as well as notable sports personalities of the day appearing as themselves.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Conor's storyline shows a pretty severe example of what amounts to workplace bullying, and it's weirdly Zoe of all people who admits she was too harsh, rather than the players who put him up to stealing her underwear. While it does have Frank and Des realising what he's been through, the amount of victim blaming he has to deal with is shocking.
  • Des is furious when Zoe wants to move out and gets a job in a hairdresser's to support herself, because she's only seventeen and he wants her to go to university. Following the 2008 recession, the rising cost of student loans and the difficult job market would make Zoe's choice look pretty sensible in hindsight.
  • Dean and Georgina are the victim of revenge porn - a security guard recording CCTV footage of them doing it - which is now considered illegal.
• The Woobie: Poor Conor McCarthy. Left homeless on his first night in England, treated like shit by everyone except Lynette, and cannot catch a break.