Ideally with animated meshes you will have just one surface, with a single texture for each mesh. This will improve speed greatly, and you would be able to use CopyEntity and EntityTexture to quickly and efficiently create lots of different textured entities.
This could be done for a football game, too - you would just need a single texture (512x256) with distinct skin and kit areas (left and right side of texture), then to change the skin or kit, dynamically copy from two textures (256x256 for skin, 256x256 for kit) to the left or right side of the single texture.
This could be done for a football game, too - you would just need a single texture (512x256) with distinct skin and kit areas (left and right side of texture), then to change the skin or kit, dynamically copy from two textures (256x256 for skin, 256x256 for kit) to the left or right side of the single texture.