Mattel Expands Its Little People Football Collectibles To All NFL Teams

After testing the idea with last year’s Super Bowl teams, Mattel
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is now offering football fans a chance to purchase Little People collectible figures featuring players from all 32 NFL teams.

For Super Bowl LVII this past February, Mattel, through its Fisher-Price Little People brand and its Mattel Creations direct-to-consumer platform, offered fans the chance to pre-order sets of four Little People figures featuring either the Kansas City Chiefs or the Philadelphia Eagles. Mattel announced then that it would only produce the figures of the winning Super Bowl team, which turned out to be the Chiefs.

The offer apparently attracted enough sales to convince Mattel to expand the collectibles line to all NFL teams, in time for the start of the football season.

Mattel announced the collectibles line today. It also is taking its collectibles and custom toys efforts a step further with an offer to let fantasy football teams compete to be immortalized in their own Little People’s set.

Mattel and Hasbro
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, the two biggest U.S. toy sellers, have been ramping up their collectibles, custom and direct-to-consumer efforts in recent years.

Mattel launched its Mattel Creations platform in 2020 to sell limited edition and artist-designed collectibles online, direct to consumers.

Mattel previously has used the platform to sell collector editions of Little People figures featuring Run DMC, The Rolling Stones, and the characters from Seinfeld, Ted Lasso and The Golden Girls and other television shows.

The NFL Little People sets will contain three player figures and a team fan dressed in fan attire, for example a Minnesota fan in a Viking headdress. Players featured in the sets will include stars like Joe Burrow, Josh Allen, Micah Parsons, and T.J. Watt.

From today until September 7, fantasy football league players can enter a contest, via the Mattel Creations website, to have their images turned into Little People figures. Up to 12 members of the winning league will be depicted as a Little People superfan with a personalized jersey and custom collector’s box.

The Super Bowl Champions Little People sets, which were priced at $30, have only started arriving at purchaser’s homes this summer. At least some of the collectibles, designed to commemorate Super Bowl LVII arrived with fan figures wearing jerseys that said Super Bowl LVI, according to a report by the Kansas City Star. That mistake, according to the Star report, has caused a stir on social media and Chiefs fan sites, and has some fans asking if they should return the figures with the wrong Super Bowl numbers or hold on to them in the hopes the mistake will make them more valuable as collectibles.

Mattel has added a football theme to two other toy lines as well. The Uno card game has released a new edition featuring the colors and graphics of the 32 NFL teams. The American Girl doll brand is selling NFL cheerleading uniforms, and fan clothing and tee shirts sized to fit American Girl dolls.