Friends (TV Series) The One with the Football (1996) User Reviews

One Of The Best Episodes Ever

[slightlymad22 · 10/10 · 17 December 2014]

One of the best episodes of "Friends".

Plot In A Paragraph: It's Thanksgiving, so everyone is at Monica's for the usual festive meal. (Even Chandler, who is not boycotting it this year for unexplained reasons) They decide to have a friendly game of American Football in the park, despite the fact the Geller parents forbade Ross and Monica to play each-other ever again after years of vicious competiveness for the 'Geller Cup'. Rachel is awful and Phoebe only marginally better. Joey and Chandler are distracted by Margha, a Dutch girls who stays watching and they start arguing over who gets to date her. The Geller-rivalry takes over- Monica even makes it boys V's girls, and every dirty trick in the book is tried to gain points.

Some serious laugh out loud moments, despite the corny ending

The One With American Thanks Giving

[devashishparnami · 9/10 · 24 February 2018]

It's Thanksgiving, so everyone is dining Monica's festive meal. After watching pros on TV, they decide to have a friendly American Football game in the park, despite the fact the Geller parents forbade Ross and Monica to play each-other ever again after years of vicious rivalry for the 'Geller Cup'. Rachel and Phoebe prove worse then worthless. Joey and Chandler are totally absorbed by Margha, a Dutch girls who stays watching and get competitive about her. Now the teams start playing to win; then the Geller-rivalry takes over- Monica even makes it boys-girls, and every dirty trick is tried

The One with the Football

[ComedyFan2010 · 9/10 · 27 June 2011]

This is a great episode with a lot of competitiveness. We get to see it between Ross and Monica and we know that it will get bad because their mom didn't allow them to play football anymore. It is done in a very funny way, I enjoyed that brother/sister dynamics, how well both actors played it and the lines ("Cheater, cheater, compulsive eater" lol)

And we also get some competitiveness between the best friends Joey and Chandler. But they are competing more for a woman than in football. And this is very funny as well. I love it how Chandler got Joey to say that Neatherlands are the place where Peter Pan lives. And they were so bad that the woman at the end refused to pick either one

The One with the Football

[Lady_Targaryen · 8/10 · 13 May 2008]

It's Thanks Giving day and while Monica and the girls are preparing the meal, the guys are watching TV. After they watch some matches, they get the idea of playing Football in the park.

Monica and Ross are rather too competitive, and because of that, they were forbidden by their parents to play Football with each other when they were younger. In the past,their parents organized the 'Geller Cup', who ended pretty bad because of their terrible behavior while playing. Deciding to ignore that, they split two teams: Monica, Phoebe and Joey, versus Ross,Rachel and Chandler. Rachel is the worst player of all(totally useless!)and Chandler and Joey start to fight over the attention of a Dutch woman that they are both interested.

Top 5 episode.

[dyingrepublicofpanama · 10/10 · 27 May 2023]

Remember when friends was good ?? Before season 5. Anything after season 5 is unwatchable and 20 years later when it's being played on television I turn off when it's post series5.

Series 3 definitely when the show peaked. Quality episodes. Characters all had their roles and gags. The stories from episode to episode were light and funny and all seemed plausible.

Football one is class. Would be top 5 episode comfortably.

I see a lot of people don't like the Dutch girl hahahah it doesn't really matter plus the gag about netherlands / never land is great.

Class episode. All these years later.

What??

[bevo-13678 · 10/10 · 6 April 2021]

I'm a bit confused as I'm sure there is another episode with a football.

The one with the Geller cup

[arnaut-44532 · 10/10 · 5 May 2021]

How can you not love this episode? Brother - sister relationship is pretty well showed and really accurate, I love how competitive they are, and not just Monica and Ross but also Joey and Chandler. Im glad Chandler got picked over Joey, I know its hard to choose between them, but Chandler always wins for me. Too bad Phoebe and Rachel cant compete in pro league, they are good players.

Ross is a nightmare

[mwcczprrc · 7/10 · 4 March 2023]

Although I love this show, Ross has never been one of my favorite characters. But this episode is really hard to watch, it makes me hate him so much. He is insufferably annoying and mean in this episode. He's not this bad in other episodes, just this one in particular. I guess I just don't like how overly competitive he is, and how mean and insensitive that makes him.

Other than that though, this is a great episode! The rivalry between Joey and Chandler is funny, and Phoebe being adorably daft about football is great. And while I think this paints Ross in a horrible light, I think Monica comes out looking better than him at least.

Dutch from the Netherlands

[MarkVanBeelen · 5/10 · 4 January 2017]

Language accuracy can be a tricky thing, which is definitely the case in this episode. Margha, a Dutch girl appears while the group is playing a game of Football. The girl speaks with a very heavy accent which unfortunately doesn't resemble the Dutch language or a Dutch accent at all. The actress portraying Margha obviously didn't do her homework. Even Joey's failed attempts of speaking French in "The one where Joey speaks French" resemble the French language more than what this actress is trying to achieve. She sounds, and even looks much more like a Russian, Ukraine or Belarusian woman. She doesn't even pronounce her own name in a typically Dutch manner. (The way you write her name isn't really the way we write it in the Netherlands; we would write Marga, without the "h".) But she could have used the typical Dutch "g"or "ch" sound to make it sound Dutch.

Since Friends became an international sensation, and was also popular beyond all belief in the Netherlands, I feel the production team could have done so much better on this little character. We, the Dutch, certainly would have been very excited to have seen and heard a real Dutch person in this series. Instead we're left wondering the entire episode about what went wrong in the casting department.

Joey's big confusion between Netherlands and Neverland makes up for it though! ;-)

'Dutch' fail

[happytraumer · 5/10 · 12 October 2015]

I'm Dutch and every time this episode comes on I'm facepalming myself because of that 'Dutch girl'. She seems nothing like a Dutch person. Her accent sounds Russian. I legit thought the actress was Russian or from another Eastern-European country, which would have given her some credit, but apparently she's American. She just used some kind of random accent that's meant to sound 'foreign' because Americans don't know the difference anyway, right? Also her hair (I'm assuming it was a wig) is literally white? If anything, her hair colour looks more Scandinavian, but really she just looks weird. Americans really have no idea, do they.

The episode loses points just because of that poor excuse for a character. It's embarrassing.

Dutch?? Hell no.....

[astrid-69599 · 4/10 · 13 September 2019]

The worst episodes of Friends. Ik really love the serie's even 25 years later. The "dutch" girl sounds and looks russian😂. Hurts my eyes to watch this episode

One of the worst episodes

[marielledeheij · 5/10 · 17 October 2019]

Where do I begin on this one?! I love friends but this episode is just cringy. The football rivalry is strange, the Dutch girl is not Dutch at all, Joey pronounces her name better than she does. And then Ross throws in all stereotypes you can think off when Joey and Chandler fight over Marga. As a Dutch person I am kind of offended but I also understand why so many Americans believe we live in windmills and walk around on clogs if this is the picture painted in the media. Friends have given us some great tv, but this episode is not it.

It's alright, not great

[studioAT · 3/10 · 13 May 2017]

It's controversial to say I know, but I don't like that episode that much.

It's got it's moments, but other than the football match there's nothing much going on.

The sight of a clearly unwell Matthew Perry is also sad to see. He does well in his scenes, but there's clearly something missing from his performance.

Matt Le Blanc stole all of his scenes, and I liked the Monica and Ross competitive nature, but other than that I can't say this is an episode I'd be keen to revisit.

Margha is an insult to Dutch people

[renskefeline-85209 · 5/10 · 12 August 2020]

I love Friends, but I really hate this episode. The supposedly Dutch girl Margha is not even close to a Dutch person. Her accent is weird, she pronounces her name wrong and having blonde hair doesn't automatically make someone look Dutch. Such a shame for such a good show.

Idk

[laithlaith · 2/10 · 8 June 2019]

This is one of the cringiest things i've ever seen

Why is this a 9.0?

[jakobaberle · 2/10 · 4 April 2021]

I'm not a huge fan of the show anyways, but this was just ridiculous and cringe.

Was this episode impromptu?

[truebatmantd · 1/10 · 5 March 2023]

This episode was so bad that I can't believe it was actually scripted. It feels like they got our 6 actors together, put them in a park, refused to give them a script and just tell them to pretend they are playing football and the whole thing was filmed in one taking in impromptu.

That's the only explanation I have for how absolutely terrible this episode was. You have to actively try to really hard to come up with something this bad. It's cringey from beginning to the end and there wasn't a single good joke or even a single good line in the entire episode.

It's just really really bad. Even beyond bad. They should just delete this episode from their DVD sets out of embarrassment.