The LEGO Football (Soccer) subtheme was the first sport featured in the Sports theme and was released in 2000. Football sets play principle involved minifigures on fixed positions that were mounted on flexible stands in the center of small pits on the field. With this play concept, two large football fields for team matches and several small training setups with fewer figures were released.
2003 LEGO Sets
While 2003 proved to be a financial disaster for LEGO we did see a number of signification events that set the tone for future LEGO recovery and investments. Most important, LEGO introduced new realistic minifigure skin tones that affected licensed themes including Star Wars, Harry Potter, Basketball, Ferrari and Spider-Man, but kept yellow skin tones for all other minifigures. In 2003, the LEGO minifigure celebrated its 25th birthday with just under four billion minifigures being produced. LEGO that year introduced a number of new themes including Clikits, Designer, Sports which consisted of hokey, basketball and Gravity Games, World City and 4 Juniors which replaced the Jack Stone theme.