One fewer/less

None of them sounds good to me. It's not a sentence at all.

Fewer players remain in the league.

Less is Comparative degree of little which is generally used with uncountable nouns.

A sentence or not, you can still say why you wouldn't use "one lesser/fewer".

The team has one less player this year.

The team has fewer experienced players this year.

With Paul being gone, the company has one less bad apple.

We have fewer response this year than last.

Both of those should be fewer. You can count the number of players and the number of bad apples.

As Fandorin explained above, "less" for things you can't count, "fewer" for things you can.

Here is what MW has to say about "less":

usage The traditional view is that less applies to matters of degree, value, or amount and modifies collective nouns, mass nouns, or nouns denoting an abstract whole while fewer applies to matters of number and modifies plural nouns. Less has been used to modify plural nouns since the days of King Alfred and the usa

AnonymousWhich would you recommend using here?

One fewer player than last season.
One less player than last season.

Hi Mr. "Anonymous"
The second one sounds idiomatic, and I can easily imagine people using it in everyday English. However, many view it as strictly an informal usage. (See Fandorin's explanation above.)

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