When I look at the sky and the bricks I get the impression that the photo has “grain”. I wonder if it was actually shot on film.

Early digital camera sensors could be quite noisy.

Digital camera sensors are still quite noisy, perhaps even more so as sensors have gotten smaller while resolutions have gotten higher (meaning even smaller pixels). We just process all the noise away most of the time.

Good point. “Visibly noisy” would have been more accurate.

This is definitely scanned. Digicams quality was terrible at the turn of the century

It's not from a digicam, it's a scan of a photo. The white bar on the left is from a subpar cropping job and is slightly crooked. The resolution (1275x1167) is higher than a typical 3:4 digital image sensor of the day, which would have maxed out at 640x480 in the late '90s to early 2000's, maybe 1024x768 for a really high-spec (expensive and uncommon) camera.

As for the "look", I'm not a photographer but this was likely taken on either a low-end handheld film camera or disposable jobbie, which were absolutely ubiquitous around this time frame because they were so cheap (practically free, until you went to develop them). The picture was taken on an overcast day at dusk, later in the evening. Just dark enough to auto-trigger the insufficient flash which lights up the middle of the image and puts everything in the periphery in a dark shadow.

I do like that the kid with the beer isn't looking at the camera and seems to have missed the point that everyone was supposed to be holding the ball.