McDonald's Happy Meal POG 2019 - Football
Welcome back, fellow Happy Meal hunters! Pull up a chair and let's talk about one of the most underrated promo sets to land in a Happy Meal box in recent memory.
The McDonald's POG 2019 wave is a European Happy Meal promotion that brought something genuinely different to the drive-thru. Rather than the standard figurine or pull-back vehicle, this set leaned into collectible game pieces - small, satisfying discs and spinning tops featuring characters and themes from across the Warner Bros. and DC catalog, along with some fun sport-themed and seasonal designs. Today's focus is the Football piece, a sporty little entry in what turned out to be a surprisingly deep and collectible wave.
The Toy Up Close
The POG 2019 Football is compact and solid in hand, with the characteristic flat-disc or spinning-top format shared across the entire wave. The football graphic is rendered cleanly on the face of the piece, with the kind of bold, simple design that makes these little discs immediately legible at a glance. The molded plastic has a satisfying weight to it - not so light that it feels throwaway, and not so heavy that it loses its playability as a spinning or stacking game piece.
The color application on POG pieces tends to vary across the wave - some rely on molded color with minimal paint, others carry printed or pad-applied graphics. The Football piece uses clean line art and a color scheme that reads clearly even at the small scale. The edges are smooth and well-finished, which is consistent with the quality found across this promo. As with most POG-style toys, there are no articulated parts, but the appeal here is the disc itself and what you do with it.
The POG format rewards a collector in a different way than a figurine does. These pieces are meant to interact with each other - to be flipped, stacked, or spun alongside the rest of the set. Finding the Football in a wave dominated by DC heroes and Looney Tunes characters makes it stand out as the sporty outlier of a very character-heavy assortment.
The POG 2019 Wave - A Deep Assortment
The POG 2019 set is genuinely one of the larger and more varied Happy Meal promotions of its era. The assortment pulls from a wide range of licenses and themes, making it a hunt-worthy wave for any serious collector. Here is a look at some of the other pieces found across this promo:
- DC Super Hero Girls - An extensive sub-set featuring individual numbered discs (No. 1 through high double digits), with characters like Supergirl, Batgirl, Katana, Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Wonder Woman, and Green Lantern represented across multiple poses and designs
- Looney Tunes - Multiple Tweety and Sylvester pieces (including Tweety on Ice, Tweety Cool, Tweety Mimi), Taz in happy and grumpy poses, Speedy Gonzales, Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, Marvin the Martian, and a Looney Tunes concert disc
- Scooby-Doo - A surprisingly large sub-assortment covering Scooby-Doo in multiple poses - sitting, boxing, surfing, soccer, on a boat, with the Mystery Machine (versions 1, 2, and 3), plus Sammy and Scooby two-packs
- Justice League and DC Heroes - The Flash, Superman in various settings (Daily Planet, Metropolis, In Space, Rescuing), Green Arrow, Hawkman, Robin, and Justice League group designs
- Fun and Season Designs - Snowboards, a Haunted Manor, a Pirate Attack, Monster designs including Ghost, Mummy, Yeti, a Smoke Monster, and the Graveyard - all excellent for the Halloween season shelf grouping
- Kini Series - Red Kini and Orange Kini, small beachy seasonal pieces
- Emblem Discs - Superman's Emblem, Wonder Woman's Emblem, Green Lantern's Emblem, Poison Ivy's Emblem, and a general Super-heroes Emblems disc
- Game and Action Discs - Let's Go!, Run!, Victory!, Surprise!, Rules, Team 1, Team 2, Team 3, Team in Desert, Team Investigation, and Fun Fair
- Character Crossovers - Taz and Bugs Bunny, Taz and Daffy Duck, Taz and Titi, Tweety and Sylvester in various scenarios (joke, tennis, golf), Pepe and Penelope
- POG Portraits and Branded Discs - Harley Quinn's Portrait, various Vera numbered discs
The Football piece fits naturally into the game-and-action corner of this wave, alongside the sports and activity-themed discs. It is the kind of piece that might get overlooked by someone chasing the DC Super Hero Girls run, but for a set-completer, it is just as necessary.
Collector Notes
The POG 2019 wave is a completionist's challenge in the best possible way. The sheer number of pieces - across DC, Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo, seasonal, game, and sport themes - means that assembling the full set takes real commitment. Individual pieces like the Football, the Kini discs, or the numbered DC Super Hero Girls discs tend to fly under the radar on the secondary market, which means patient collectors can often fill gaps at reasonable prices.
From a display standpoint, these pieces work beautifully in a shallow tray or tiered shelf, where the faces of the discs are visible at a glance. Grouping by theme - all the Scooby-Doo pieces together, the DC emblems in a row, the sport and game discs in their own section - gives the collection a gallery-like quality that figurine waves rarely achieve at this price point.
Durability is solid. The hard plastic construction holds up well, and the graphics show minimal wear under normal handling. The Football piece in particular, with its simple printed design, ages cleanly. These are toys designed to be played with and passed around, and they hold up to that use without looking worn out.
For parents, the POG format introduces a genuine game element - kids can play the classic POG slammer game or just enjoy the spinning top mechanic, which gives these pieces real play value beyond simple display. For adult collectors, the set rewards patience and thoroughness, with a regional character that makes the full assortment feel genuinely special.
I have the Football on my need list in the Collectiblz app - it is one of the last sport-themed pieces I need to finish out that corner of my POG 2019 display. If you are tracking your own set, the Collectiblz app makes it easy to log which discs you have and flag the ones still on the hunt list.
- K.M. 🥤
