Gift Ideas for little Football Fans

Friday Five Football

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock somewhere, you’re probably aware that the UEFA European Football Championship starts today. We’re pretty big fans of national football in our house, and always eagerly follow the European and World cups. Scotland, unfortunately, rarely qualifies – as is the case this time round – but luckily we still have Germany to support. The wee one of course doesn’t really understand what’s going on yet, but I’ve managed to recruit my older son as a viewing buddy for the matches that are on earlier in the day. At the last World Cup, we had a couple of ‘football picnics’ in front of the TV, and ever since he’s been asking when we can do it again. Well, the answer is ‘this weekend!’ and I’ve got a couple of other little surprises up my sleeve for him to celebrate. So, if you have any little football fans in your life, here are some UEFA Championship inspired gift ideas, clockwise starting top left. They are heavily influenced by the German team, but you can of course substitute for similar items relating to your team of choice!

  • The most obvious gift, would of course be a football strip for your team of choice. I treated myself to an official German national football team shirt after the last World Cup, available via the DFB fan shop, but considering how fast kids grow, I went for a slightly cheaper option for the boys and got them football T-shirts from H&M. They have various countries, including Germany, Sweden, England, the Netherlands, Brazil, Italy, France and Spain.
  • Books always go down a treat in our house! For my older boy, I’ve ordered a book from the Swedish kids detective series by Martin Widmark, which we recently discovered, which includes one about a football mystery*. Unfortunately, although the series is available in English (the Whodunit Detective Agency), the football mystery has not been translated yet, but you could just search for other football stories. For the little one, I’ve ordered the German translation of the French board book ‘Mein erstes Buch vom Fußball‘* (My first book about football), which has interactive bits that slide and pop up. He already has a couple of others from the same series and absolutely loves them! Alas, these have also not been translated in to English yet, but the text is minimal so you could just order the German or French version and quickly run the few sentences through Google translate.
  • If you or your kids are a fan of Lego mini figs and/or the German national football team, then you have to get your hands on some of the special edition mini figs that which Lego and the DFB have released in a special collaboration. We already have Boateng, and three more bags to open. They’re available at Lego stores in Germany, Austria and Switzerland though apparently they have also been sighted at some UK stores. Or you can get them, at an inflated price, via Amazon*. For anyone interested, Jay’s Brick Blog has an in depth post about the series.
  • If you’re a fan of Playmobil rather than Lego, then you’ve got quite a few football options there. I’ve treated the boys to the penalty shoot out set*, with some kind of generic football players, or you could go for one of the national players. Options include Germany, England, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Greece, Argentina, Austria, Croatia and Czech Republic. No Scotland though. Humpf.
  • And, finally, we love playing board games in our family and I have my eye on this ‘Football Game‘*, a football version of snakes and ladders. It’s the only thing on the list I’m recommending that we don’t have ourselves, but it has excellent reviews all round on Amazon and we have a couple of other board games from Orchard Toys which are all great.

*Please note these are Affiliate links. If you buy anything via these links, I will receive a small percentage of the sales. 

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