Football Coloring Pages

Most football sheets are a ball, a helmet and a crest. These free printable football coloring pages are drawn as a game instead, from the coin toss to the end zone: two captains shaking hands at the halfway line with their helmets at their sides, a center bent over the ball with the quarterback's hands waiting behind him, a receiver leaping with both arms above his head, a runner hurdling a tackler who has gone down flat.

Nothing in the set carries a name, a number or a logo. The scoreboard is a frame of blank panels. That was deliberate: a child colors their own team, and the sheets work for any club in any town.

Two colors, decided before anyone starts

This is the one collection where the first decision matters more than the coloring.

• Pick two team colors and keep them across every sheet. Jersey, helmet, socks. The set then hangs together on a wall.
• The field takes two greens in stripes running across the page, the way a mown field looks from the stand.
• Leave the yard lines and the numbers-free markings as bare paper. Coloring over them is the single most common way one of these sheets goes wrong.
• Helmets get one flat color with a bare white stripe down the middle and the face mask left gray.
• The ball is brown with white laces left uncolored, and a thin white ring at each end.
• Crowds stay pale. A packed stand in strong color pulls the eye off the players.

For a table of mixed ages

Quick to color above the grid keeps the roomiest shapes, quickest page first.

• A goal post with a wind ribbon
• A bear mascot waving a pennant
• A close catch in two hands

This collection has an unusually wide fast band, which makes it a good one for a party: the ball on its tee, the helmet face on, the goal post with a ribbon tied to the crossbar. Print three or four different sheets rather than thirty copies of one.

Older children go for the action: the quarterback winding up with a team mate blocking behind him, the punter dropping the ball with his kicking leg already through, the tackle just short of the posts, the catch crossing the marker into the end zone.

The half of a game that is not the game

Plenty of these sheets are about everything around the play, and they are the ones that tend to get colored most carefully. A locker with a jersey hanging above boots lined up underneath. A wheeled trolley carrying shoulder pads, helmets and a basket of gloves on three shelves. A folding chair, a cool box and a ball behind the dropped tailgate of a pickup. A coach in a headset holding up a play board by the water cooler. A man tossing a ball to a small boy on the grass beside a rope swing.

That last one is the sheet to print for a child who watches the game with someone rather than playing it.

Game day, made out of paper

A football sheet is at its most useful on the afternoon of a match, when there are children in the house and two hours to fill before kick-off.

The helmet seen face on is the sheet to start with. Colored in the team's two colors and cut out, it tapes to a window or a car door. Half a dozen of them down a hallway is a tunnel to run through, which is exactly what a six-year-old will do with it.

The pennant the mascot is waving cuts out into a real pennant: color it, glue it to a garden cane, and it gets waved. The scoreboard sheet, with its blank panels, works on the wall beside the television with the numbers written on with a wipe-clean marker and changed as the game goes.

For the table, the ball on its tee scales down to a place marker, and the two captains shaking hands, folded in half, is the card you send the relative whose team lost.

Afterwards, the locker and the kit trolley are the ones worth keeping. They are the quietest in the set and the ones an older child colors properly, long after the game is over.

The sports drawer holds whatever comes next, the monster truck coloring pages fill the same Saturday, and the Thanksgiving pages cover the other big game of the year.

What the equipment is actually for

Every piece of kit on these pages solves a specific problem, and saying so makes the drawings less abstract.

The helmet has a hard shell to spread an impact and a suspension system inside so the head does not touch the shell. The face mask is a cage, and the number of bars differs by position: linemen get more bars for protection, receivers fewer so they can see the ball.

Shoulder pads are not padding on the shoulders so much as a frame that sits on the collarbone and transfers force to the chest and back.

The ball's shape is the interesting one. It is a prolate spheroid, pointed at both ends, which is why it can be thrown in a tight spiral and why it bounces unpredictably. The laces are there to grip when throwing, not decoration, and that is why they are always drawn on the upper surface.

The yard lines are every five yards, with the numbers every ten, and the short marks between them are single yards. A field is 100 yards between the goal lines plus two end zones.

For coloring: the helmet takes a hard bare-paper highlight because it is glossy, and the ball does not, because leather is not.

The busiest pages, for older kids and grown-ups

The other button, Lots of detail, gathers the crowded pages and starts with the heaviest.

• The scoreboard above the stands
• A coach going over a play
• A kit trolley loaded with gear

The tunnel under the floodlit stands, the mascot in front of a packed crowd and the marching drummer in a plumed hat are the ones that take an hour. Keep the palette to the two team colors plus grays, and let the crowd stay pale.

Each sheet is a free A4 PDF at 300 dpi, with no sign-up. Print at 100 % scale on A4, or choose "fit to page" on US Letter so nothing is clipped; the printing guide has the settings. Press Add to pack under the sheets you want and print them together as one PDF.