Sports sports sports sports sports…
If you’re not a sports fan then life must feel like that episode of the Simpsons when the decidedly anti-sports Lisa has to pick a sport to play to avoid failing gym class. Marge is attempting to comfort her by insisting that sports aren’t everything, only for Homer to interrupt, and, well, you get the idea.
So at the risk of sullying your favourite LEGO app with a long read about sports in LEGO, here’s a long read about sports in LEGO. Hopefully there’s something for the non-sports fans here too, because this isn’t going to be an ode to how wonderful all sports are (no one likes all sports, and how can anyone like rugby union?) but rather a deeper look at the relationship between LEGO, the LEGO Group and sports and how the two do – or don’t – work together.
LEGO Sports – and sports in LEGO
There are two broad categories for the LEGO Group’s sporting offering – LEGO versions of popular sports, and sets that are effectively branded merchandise for a particular club or league. The former includes sets such as 42622 Adventure Camp Archery Range, or, in a roundabout way, 21337 Table Football.
A dedicated Sports theme was launched in 2000 and was largely made up of branded sets showing a snapshot of basketball, hockey or football. These were innovative – 3409 Championship Challenge had a mechanism that allowed the minifigures to actually kick a ball and 3578 NHL Championship Challenge did something similar but for hockey players and the puck.
The Sports sets were also important in other ways: 3416 Women’s Soccer Team had six female minifigures, the most female minifigures included in a set by that point in time. The NBA sets, meanwhile, featured minifigures of famous players such as Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant and was the first time realistic skin tones for minifigures had been used in LEGO sets, an important step towards greater representation and diversity within the LEGO world.
Outside of the Sports theme, LEGO has featured athletes in Collectible Minifigures, including a series dedicated to Team GB in conjunction with the 2012 London Olympics. These were however generic minifigures – Agile Archer, Wondrous Weightlifter and Flexible Gymnast to name three – and not styled after any specific athlete.
It’s just not cricket
Featuring sports and athletes in the CMF theme helped the LEGO Group cover a lot of ground, but there nevertheless some significant omissions from LEGO’s sporting catalogue; the most glaring is cricket. There isn’t a single LEGO set devoted to the game of cricket, despite it being among the most popular sports in the world – the 2023 Cricket World Cup final had an estimated viewing audience of 300m people worldwide and the tournament as a whole was attended by more than 1m spectators.
It’s also a game with worldwide appeal. Its roots may be in England but it is the most popular sport in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and other countries in the Asian sub-continent and has a big following in Australia and New Zealand and the Caribbean. These are the traditional hotspots but cricket is a growing sport in North America – Major League Cricket was launched in the United States in 2023 and cricket will be played at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles; both are 20-over versions of the game, a format that has proved successful around the world over the past 20 years.
Why has cricket not had a LEGO set yet? Only the LEGO Group can answer that. There’s no lack of legendary players – WG Grace, Ellyse Perry, Shane Warne or MS Dhoni to name just a few – and there are iconic grounds where the sport has been played too; Lord’s, the home of English cricket, could make for an interesting build.
Composite image of the three LEGO Ideas cricket sets here
There have been attempts to push a cricket-based set through the LEGO Ideas program – this one for a Cricket World Cup stadium, this one for a generic old timey cricketer and this one also for a generic cricketer, for example – but none have made it all the way. Have the LEGO Group taken that as a sign that there isn’t enough interest in a cricket-themed set? Perhaps. But done right, a LEGO cricket set could be a real winner.
A brick-built field, brick-built wickets and stands and minifigures holding bats and a ball, in full cricket regalia? Or a faithful LEGO version of one of the game’s greats? These are sets waiting to be made.
Cricket isn’t the only place where sports representation in LEGO is lacking; Lionel Messi, Usain Bolt and Serena Williams are names recognised on the same level as Luke Skywalker, Iron Man or Batman, they just happen to be real people you can see in the flesh. The comic book characters are widely represented in LEGO sets but the real, human athletes are not.
Indeed, there are a lot of custom Messi minifigures, plenty of Ideas sets devoted to arguably the greatest football player of all time, but no official LEGO releases.
40485 FC Barcelona celebration here (GWP, needs adding)
Image rights may be an issue – Messi and his ilk don’t come cheap and when LEGO did produce 40485 FC Barcelona Celebration as a Gift-With-Purchase the minifigures included were fans rather than players – but it’s not as if rights to the Marvel characters that make up the backbone LEGO’s offerings over the last decade were given away for pennies, either.
A game of two halves
But even the best sports-themed LEGO sets run in to some unavoidable problems. At a fundamental level, LEGO and sports appear to be polar opposites. Building a LEGO set can be peaceful, almost meditative and, crucially, happens in the home. Watching sport – particularly with a vested interest in the success of one participant or team – is neither peaceful nor meditative, and while it’s obviously possible to watch from the comfort of your own living room, it’s always better in the stadium.
Sport is also meant to be played. It’s an active, physical pursuit; unless extreme LEGO building takes off – constructing a Millennium Falcon while dangling off the side of a mountain, for example – the two activities are worlds apart. No matter how successful the LEGO set, it will struggle to capture what makes sport so appealing to so many people.
So while LEGO sports sets can’t replicate the appeal of sports, they can capture other important elements – the feeling of belonging that comes from supporting a particular team (though that in itself is rife with issues) and the grandeur of the world’s great sporting venues.
It’s natural that LEGO would venture into models of iconic football stadiums. Manchester United’s Old Trafford, Barcelona’s Camp Nou and Real Madrid’s Santiago Bernabeu are the modern-day equivalent of the Coliseum and as representative of their cities as the Eiffel Tower.
But those landmarks don’t have the partisan baggage of football. You could be the biggest LEGO fan in the world but if you’re also a Liverpool supporter, are you really going to buy the LEGO Old Trafford? Manchester United were sponsored by Vodafone in the early 2000s and some Liverpool fans switched their mobile phone provider as a result; deciding not to buy an otherwise-appealing LEGO set wouldn’t be an issue.
Not only that but many cities are home to two football clubs; the LEGO Group risked raising the ire of Manchester City fans by producing a version of United’s ground but not City’s. It might sound silly – it is silly – but it’s true.
It begs the question who were sets such as these for. LEGO may have partnered with three of the best-supported clubs in the world, but the Venn diagram of Manchester United supporters and LEGO fans willing to spend the best part of £250 can’t be that wide. For anyone in that category, the set also has to be accurate to the most exacting detail or it will miss the mark, and still be an engaging set to build. If you’re a Manchester United fan with no interest in LEGO – or a LEGO fan with no interest in Manchester United – it’s unlikely to make it to your wishlist.
Then there are the LEGO fans who don’t care about the team the set represents or maybe the sport at all, so for them it just has to be an interesting and worthwhile build. The LEGO Group appeared to get it right with Old Trafford, Camp Nou and Santiago Bernabeu but it’s worth noting that the price steadily increased, to the point that the final one of the trio cost just over £300. That’s a lot of money to spend on a theme you might not be that interested in.
The Formula 1 Collectibles coming on May 1 might hit the sweet spot – inexpensive and the right size to sit on a bookcase along with other expressions of fandom, whether for F1 as a whole or a particular team, though they’ve already fallen foul of another issue.
Sport changes quickly. Players leave teams, teams are relegated (at least outside of American sports) and kits and, in the case of Formula 1, cars change; in fact, the Formula 1 Collectible Race Cars sets feature the VCARB team that has since changed its name to Racing Bulls. The F1 Collectible Race Cars were out of date before they were even released, a problem the LEGO Group would face if they tried to produce, for example, sets for a season’s 20 Premier League teams or New England Patriots roster.
They might not be the most interesting sets to build – the 12 cars are the same just with different colours – and one car might already be an historical artefact, but an F1 fan who can’t get enough F1-branded merch might not care too much about that.
They’ll conceivably be happy to have another way of showing their love for the sport without having to shell out on the bigger F1 sets; buying all 10 from the Speed Champions range would cost more than £200, but all 12 F1 Collectibles could be, well, collected for less than half that (*cheap plug* and less again if they use the Brick Search app’s minifigure code scanner *cheap plug*).
Common ground
Where LEGO and sport do crossover, though, is in what the appeal truly is. It’s a sense of community. The sport – the LEGO set – is not what bonds us. It’s the relationships we build around the two hobbies that draw us back. Without that, LEGO is just some plastic blocks stuck together and sports is just some people chasing a ball around a field. It’s the people we share our passions with that truly make the difference.
It’s a release, an escape and a way of seeing the world. Both sport and LEGO allow us to turn our minds to something else and to feel better about our place in the world. Viewed in that way, it almost doesn’t matter what sports sets LEGO produces – both sports and LEGO being there is enough, even if they don’t crossover perfectly.