LEGO Ideas team revealed that they were faced with quite several complications during the developmental process of the 21337 Table Football set, so much so that the team almost cancelled the entire set. 

The 21337 Table Football set is not a matching replica of the original submission by fan designer Donát Fehérvári for the “We Love Sports” product ideas contest. The mini-sized set has just two rows of five players for each team, unlike the original submission, which was designed as a full-scale table field comprising 11 players for each team.



The Ideas team initially sought to replicate the set’s original design and scale, but could not move on with the model based on the difficulties encountered in bringing the set to life. According to LEGO Ideas Manger Samuel Johnson, the Ideas team had to deeply question the feasibility of the model before making the uncomfortable decision they had to make in the course of development.

He said in a statement to Brickset - “When deciding on the winner of the ‘We Love Sports’ contest, I constructed a model and thought it was fine. Unfortunately, before passing it to product development, they found some problems, which came after we had announced that the Table Football had won.” 

At that point in the development process, the team began to thoroughly test several designs based on the 11-a-side scale of the original model. As a result, Johnson stated that the set is probably the most tested LEGO model in LEGO history. 

“We have been through some real highs and some very deep lows with the development, to the degree that we came close to cancelling it at times. The game is not necessarily as relaxed as we might hope, so we built loads of 11-a-side models, and they were utterly destroyed in testing.” He explained. The LEGO Ideas manager also went further to give more details about the development cycle:

“We found that the cross axle, which was the obvious element to create the control rods, were bending and even snapping at times. We tried to strengthen the walls from there, but honestly found ourselves just moving the same problems around. Every designer on the adult team helping us to reach this stage with the model. At one point, we thought we had found the solution by assembling square beams with Technic beams overlapping, but even that bends a great deal.”

It became clear to the team that sustaining the scale of the original product model would not be possible. Senior Marketing Manager Monica Pedersen revealed that the situation led to an “awkward meeting” where they decided to go with a different version of the model. Thanks to the brilliant LEGO Ideas designers, there were several variations to choose from, and it was decided that the team would go with the miniature version, which would equally enable fans to have fun. 

Despite the efforts of the LEGO Ideas team, they could not create a set with the exact scale of the initial model. Regardless, the small-scaled set allowed the creative team to “keep the fun” while keeping the game intense.

You can see the release and more information about this set at the LEGO website.