While no it cant force it for free and they are free to have an Ad based version the cookies could be considered a violation of the ePrivacy regulation:
Allow users to access your service even if they refuse to allow the use of certain cookies
Make it as easy for users to withdraw their consent as it was for them to give their consent in the first place.
Although the EU has been pretty lax in terms of enforcing a lot of these regulations
It depends on the sort of team event, if its one where people co-operate to get a total outcome I agree with you. But in this sort of event there is no co-operative element as its just people grouped together showing individual performance. So even if he performed the best out of everyone, if his teammate did the worst it would literally cancel out his performance due to the team aspect.