YMMV / Fantasy Football League

• Crosses the Line Twice: David and Frank's lampooning of Jason Lee, who played for Nottingham Forest at the time. This started out as mockery for his perceived poor footballing ability (for a while, he struggled to get into Forest's first team) but soon moved onto jokes about his appearance, particularly his distinctive hairstyle which was described as resembling a pineapple. This quickly led to fans chanting abuse at him at games ^note "He's got a pineapple, on his head" to the tune of "He's Got the Whole World, in His Hands" - Lee himself noted that the Forest fans would sing it with affection, but largely thanks to the show opposition fans would sing it as lampooning, while David took it up to eleven by wearing blackface for sketches about him (basically, David-as-Lee, face darkened by make-up and clad in a Forest shirt with something resembling a pineapple atop his head, would try to throw something in the bin, only to miss it). Jason Lee himself, who got a number-one buzz-cut in an attempt to avert the abuse ^note leading to reports that the song was changed to "He's got a grapefruit on his head", later described it as "a form of bullying", and both David and Frank have since admitted that their behaviour was unacceptable.
• Growing the Beard: The gradual abandonment of the 'fantasy league' element in favour of a greater emphasis on comedic observations about football and skits/sketches.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In a 1998 episode, Frank started to make a remark about Jimmy Savile in connection with an eight year-old viewer who'd written in, only to quickly back-track (a similar incident occurred in an episode of Baddiel And Skinner Unplanned). Given the many, many unsavoury revelations about Savile that came out after his death thirteen years later, one has to wonder what rumours Frank might have heard over the years, and the extent to which Savile's behaviour was the subject of commonplace gossip within the entertainment industry.
• Seasonal Rot: The show was in its prime from the second series to Euro 96. Things declined thereafter, coinciding with the move to ITV, following which it no longer ran during the football season. In fact, there was a two-year gap between the last BBC series and the first ITV one (the latter being aired immediately prior to and during the 1998 World Cup), followed by a six-year gap between the two series on the latter.
• Spiritual Predecessor: Fantasy Football League is arguably this to Sky's Saturday morning football-based comedy/talk show Soccer AM, which was first broadcast in 1995.
  • On a more obvious note, it's this to some of David and Frank's later work - Baddiel And Skinner Unplanned (in which they sit on a sofa in front of an audience and talk about everything but football), the podcast they did for the 2006 World Cup and the Absolute Radio show they presented from South Africa during the 2010 World Cup.
  • And just about any football TV show, radio show or podcast that seeks to inject some humour into the proceedings. For example, the "2 Good 2 Bad" segment on Match of the Day 2 is basically "A Few Things We've Noticed from Watching Football" by another name.
• Spiritual Successor: Fantasy Football League is this to Standing Room Only, an early 1990s BBC show about football which was inspired by the growing popularity of football fanzines which offered an outlet for the opinions of fans as opposed to players and pundits. David even did a few skits on it. Also, David and Frank both acknowledged the debt they owed to Saint and Greavsie, ITV's Saturday lunchtime football show which ran from 1985 to 1992 and which had more comedic elements than most pundit-based sports shows.
• Values Dissonance: There are several things which really date the show when looking back on it from two decades after it was broadcast:
  • The mockery of Jason Lee (see above), especially David's use of blackface in sketches about him.
  • There were elements of what would now be called casual racism which went almost unnoticed at the time, such as when they had Roddy Doyle on and Frank kept addressing him as "Paddy".
  • Frank's mocking of Jimmy Greaves for his problems with alcoholism, especially given that Frank himself had had problems with this.
  • And, of course, the fact that guests were allowed to smoke on set.