A lot of play value, in such a small set.

I have this one. Plus a couple of the other two in the set (the goalie) and the one with the spinny target thingy. I found them in a random shop on holiday for £1 each years ago when I was technically still in a semi dark age. I am very impressed I have never lost the footballs. They can fly quite far with those springy things.
(this is generally as far as my interest in anything football related goes)

I like the idea of a Lego streaker, but they never used to make torsos purely in yellow (or if they did, it was the classic yellow spaceman, so it would have the printing). And I kind of suspected they didn't make yellow torsos for that reason.

But then in recent years, we've gotten shirtless printing on minifig torsos (and some of those Lego figures are *ripped*, like, damn). So all's well that ends well.

no printing on the yellow spaceman legs--just need one of those "ripped" torsos and it's streaker time!

Never cared much for Lego football, largely due due to my disinterest in the sport itself, but I do thank it for giving us those springy step thingies. So much fun as catapults in the Viking line later on

Does anyone know why they made two versions of this set that, as far as I can tell, seem identical except for set number? Because I had the 3412 version, and I can't see any differences here at all.

LEGO should return with the sports theme.

@Zordboy There's SpongeBob's torso though. I'd know, that's what I used myself.

@Zordboy: Yellow torsos without any kind of printing to mark them as clothing have been in sets since 6040-1 in 1984, and even with yellow arms and hands on the figurehead of 6285-1 in 1989. So the possibility of "minifigure nudity" was definitely possible back then even without defacing a printed outfit like the classic space torsos.

@dtobin123: It's kind of wild every time I'm reminded that LEGO has made sets featuring a police riot squad… perhaps that's in part because historically, here in the US, riots are less often associated less with drunk or rowdy sports fans and more with things like past and present civil rights rallies and protests, in which the involvement of police in riot gear often has had a history of making things worse rather than better.

That said, at some point LEGO did make a policy decision to entirely stop making the minifigure hip piece in yellow. So on some levels, you could say that's now officially recognized as representing nudity. :S It's perhaps for this reason that licensed characters with yellow briefs or pants (like Wolverine, Cyclops, Reverse Flash, and Zeb Orrelios) tend to use Flame Yellowish hips instead of regular Bright Yellow ones, even though in most cases they themselves don't have yellow skin that would make those parts appear "naked" in their original context.

@andrelego: I suspect one of the things that's held LEGO back from bringing Sports back as a full theme (besides the fact that there can be huge discrepancies between which sports are popular in which parts of the world or even within a particular country) is that a lot of the time, organized sports are not all that conducive to either a robust play scenario or a really exciting build. After all, the primary setting of a lot of the major sports is a relatively flat, empty field. You can certainly build the stands and other stuff AROUND the field, but there's not much about the field itself that is particularly interesting. As far as the play patterns go, when playing with a LEGO set, you typically only have two hands with which to manipulate figures and props. Whereas a lot of the thrills and excitement in team sports come from the fact that so many people are involved in the action in so many different ways at any given time.

Having had some of the soccer (forgive my American-ness) sets, even as somebody who had grown up playing soccer, they tended to get boring fairly quickly. Even though LEGO tried to incorporate spring-action to add a sense of speed and skill rather than the clumsiness and chaos of two kids each trying to ram a minifigure into a marble, playing competitively with them was slow and choppy. When a particular player had the ball there was really nothing any other player besides the goalies could do while they lined up their shot, and once they kicked the ball there was again nothing anybody could do until it had settled next to another player… in a lot of ways, more like golf than soccer.

Also, playing with spring-loaded minifigures where tiny movements make a big difference in where the ball goes require a fundamentally different type of motor skills than real-life physical activity. My general lack of finesse and struggle to understand the mechanical principles behind how to make a skill– or technique-intensive toy go where you want it to go or do what you want it to do is also part of why I have generally been so preferential to the spinner/flier gimmicks from Ninjago over the Speedorz gimmick from Legends of Chima. With Ninjago spinners and fliers, there's really not much in the way of a learning curve to learning the most basic techniques, and whether you play independently or competitively, unintended and surprising outcomes are a big part of the fun and excitement. But the Speedorz sets tended to be structured around targets and obstacle courses where your ability to understand what each particular objective required you to do played a big role in determining whether they were any fun at all or purely frustrating.