Seeking 'architecture' advice for a team of soccer playing ragdolls

As I mentioned before, I have put my project Unga Munga Survival of the Smartest aside for a while because however interesting the concept, I fail to make the game play work. It was fun, and I do run it often just to see the brains evolve. I am now looking into making a soccer game. But not with boring FIFA soccer, but soccer like we amateurs play it. It will be a first person whimsical soccer game, that revolves around what in Dutch is called a ‘Beer team’: older men who play just to get to the ‘third half’ (is that a common expression in English?) The players will be unique cartoonish character models, that will be controlled as active ragdolls to allow for maximal suffering from each others lack of skills. All characters will share a number of common actions like running and kicking the ball, but they will also have unique skills like faking injuries, complaining to the referee, fighting and taunting players of the opposite team. Some players will be short and fat, others may be fast. There will be players that are slow and need to compensate that with foul play. It will be chaos. I am trying to figure out what the best way to set this game up. I would like to create a single ‘controller’ class to use for every player. This class should take care of the generic animations and allow for unique features. Should I rig all models with the same skeleton? Would that be enough to reuse animations between them, even though sizes (and weight) may vary between different players?