Despite what the name implies, this football game doesn’t pit Disney franchises against each other, instead only focusing on Mickey Mouse. And even then, just a few core characters from Mickey Mouse. A cartoon sports game might decide to make this deficit less obvious by having teams of 3, but Disney Sports Football keeps to the full complement of 11.
Which means that each team consists of one famous character and a bunch of random animals. I can understand filling gaps with generic creatures, but each team is filled with carbon copies of a single character. A few extra characters from the wider Mickey Mouse lore (such as family members – put Max on Goofy’s team, for example) would have helped fill in some gaps.
On top of all that, it’s a fairly basic football game. There’s a basic pass and basic shoot, and it never gets more complicated than that. If you play through the campaign mode, you can get more teams. For example, if you play as Pete or one of the two other Mickey villains, you unlock Mickey’s All Stars, which features all five of the core Mickey characters (Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy and Goofy) on one team, but you’re already bored by that point. There’s lots more to come, though, as Mickey Mouse was very prolific on GameCube, and all of them exclusive to Nintendo.