Trivia / Dream Team

• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Michael Legge is not only Irish, like Conor McCarthy, but they're both from Newry, in County Down.
  • Darren Morfitt and Daymon Britton are both from Newcastle, and there were talks of making the brothers have grown up in different parts of the country if they couldn't find the right actor for Dean.
  • Clemency Burton-Hill was sixteen, the same age as Georgina.
  • They had wanted to explore a storyline involving a player possibly being gay or bisexual, and they picked Frank because his actor Colin Parry had "experience playing similar roles", most memorably in Hollyoaks.
• Cast the Expert: For Karl Fletcher's wedding, they had the actual local vicar play the one officiating.
• Dawson Casting: Zoe is seventeen in the first season, but her actress Sam Loggin was already twenty.
• Defictionalization: Harchester United kits were later manufactured.
• Dueling Works: With Footballers' Wives, which ITV created in response to losing a bidding war against Sky One for the series. While Dream Team lasted longer and had more episodes, Footballers' Wives had the higher production values.
• Enforced Method Acting: Many of the actors playing the footballers would live together, as well as training and eating together to properly build up a comradery.
• Friendship on the Set: Daymon Britton and Terry Kiely are still good friends twenty years on.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Georgina is only in the show because of her father is the club owner, and has no interest in football. Clemency Burton-Hill actually said that she was the only actor on set to be a football superfan (supporting Arsenal).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The series has never been released to VHS or DVD, and has yet to be uploaded to any streaming service. Recordings have been uploaded to YouTube but several episodes are missing. This is because the contracts didn't include a "public selling rights" clause, because VHS was the norm in 1997, and a soap with that much episodes was unlikely to be released to VHS.
• Killed by Request:
  • Daymon Britton wanted to leave the show in Season 3, so Sean was one of the players killed in the plane crash. He later regretted that, saying it might have been better for his career to have a more open-ended exit.
  • Jamie Parker's famous death was the result of Jim Alexander wanting to leave, dissatisfied with "the way the company treated all their employees".
  • Frank Stone likewise was killed off because Colin Parry didn't want to live in London anymore, and found travelling back home to Salford "a real pain".
• Missing Episode: Seasons 1 and 2 were never repeated after their original week of being shown, and some of the episodes are just considered lost.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Philip Barantini admits to spending too much time drinking and frequently being late to set, resulting in Billy O'Neill being transferred to West Ham.
• Screwed by the Lawyers: Reruns stopped after 2008 because the footage of real Premiere League games would need its license renewed, which would prove too costly to justify. The music used for so many episodes would also require another costly license renewal or severe editing.
• Screwed by the Network: The series' cancellation in 2007 was said to be because of low ratings, but that was later found out to be a lie; it was one of the highest rated programs on Sunday nights at that point. Rather, a new Sky One controller wanted to funnel the money used on Dream Team to create new projects.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: The switch to the first team in the second season came about because of the rotoscoping technique making it easier to use footage from premiership games.
• Technology Marches On:
  • Conor's whole introduction is rooted firmly in the days before widespread mobile phone usage. He doesn't have one himself, meaning Des has to rely on someone in his house hearing his answering machine, that Zoe ignores to allow for more miscommunications.
  • The next episode where Des arrives home also has him not knowing about Dean's performance until Lynette shows him a newspaper. Social media would have taken care of that.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Daymon Britton was first cast as Dean, but they had trouble finding a good fit for Sean, so they offered him that role instead.
  • The intent was to focus just on the youth team, but creator Jane Hewland admitted that people had very little interest in them, with her own son begging her to show the "rich and famous" players. They hoped to include both in Season 2, but the drama became too cluttered.
• Word of Saint Paul: Georgina's fate is never confirmed, with her last being scene facing possible death if she doesn't get an emergency liver transplant. Clemency Burton-Hill ended an interview after the series' cancellation with "RIP", indicating she believed Georgina to have died.