Vintage 1997 NFL Kansas City Chiefs Fingernail Tattoos 🏈 Play-By-Play San Antonio - Sealed Football Novelty Package Card, Spark Team Spirit

Fingernail Tattoos for Chiefs Fans? 🏈 Vintage 1997 Kansas City Chiefs NFL Sealed Pack, Play-By-Play San Antonio

Size: 2 1/2" x 2 1/2"

🏈 What's In the Pack

This is a sealed, New Old Stock pack of Kansas City Chiefs NFL Fingernail Tattoos, distributed by Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties of San Antonio, Texas, and made in Taiwan, carrying the printed copyright "© 1997 NFL Properties, Inc. All rights reserved." on the tattoo sheet. The header card sets the star-spangled NFL shield over a painted stadium field, lists the pitch in plain black type — Easy to apply, Easy to remove, Waterproof, Lasts for days, Safe & non-toxic — and stamps FINGERNAIL TATTOOS across the turf in bold yellow, with "Not recommended for children under 3 years of age" and MADE IN TAIWAN printed beside it.

Ten red-and-white arrowhead tattoos with the interlocked "KC" sit on the tan sheet, printed mirror-reversed so the image reads correctly once it's pressed on: these are water-slide transfers, applied tattoo-side-down, which is exactly why the printing looks flipped on the sheet itself. Flip the card over and the back walks through the four-step application and removal in little red-line drawings — remove the sheet, press it down tattoo-side-down, wet the paper, peel and rinse. The example tattoo in those drawings is, oddly, a Pittsburgh Steelers logo — Play-By-Play clearly ran one generic instruction back across every team in the line. At the bottom it reads "DISTRIBUTED BY Play-By-Play TOYS & NOVELTIES, SAN ANTONIO, TX 78218-0267." Collectors say Play-By-Play only made this card for about a dozen NFL teams, which makes chasing a full team run half the fun.

🏹 The Arrowhead, and the 1997 Season

The story goes that Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt sketched the interlocked "KC" inside an arrowhead on a napkin back in 1963, taking his inspiration from the San Francisco 49ers' own interlocked "SF" in an oval. The franchise itself started life in 1960 as the Dallas Texans, moved to Kansas City in 1963, and took the name Chiefs in honor of Mayor H. Roe Bartle, known locally as "The Chief." The arrowhead didn't become the team's primary logo until 1972, timed to the opening of Arrowhead Stadium — and it's been the Chiefs' mark ever since, exactly as it appears on this sheet.

On the field, 1997 was a strong year: the Chiefs went 13-3 and won the AFC West under head coach Marty Schottenheimer and general manager Carl Peterson, playing out of Arrowhead Stadium. A quarterback controversy between Rich Gannon and Elvis Grbac ran the whole season, and it was the final year for future Hall of Fame running back Marcus Allen. Kansas City lost the divisional playoff game at home, 14-10, to a Denver team that went on to win the Super Bowl — and it turned out to be the Chiefs' last playoff trip until 2003.

🎪 Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties, San Antonio

Play-By-Play was founded in San Antonio in 1986 by Arturo Torres, who started the company as a vending-machine prize supplier and took it public in 1995. In June 1996 it bought Ace Novelty for about $44 million, which by its own filings made it the leading supplier of stuffed toys and novelties to the U.S. amusement trade — theme parks, arcades, carnivals, state fairs — and by 1998 the company held roughly half of the entire carnival prize market. It kept buying, too: in November 1996 it picked up the TLC Gift Company of Doncaster, England, and in 1998 its UK arm signed on to distribute Walt Disney's plush line across the United Kingdom and Ireland, a deal worth about $5 million in its first year. And here's a fun one: a fight over the company's spinning, laughing Tornado Taz plush became Nadel v. Play-By-Play Toys & Novelties, decided by the federal Second Circuit in 2000 with Sonia Sotomayor on the panel, and law students still read it today as a leading case on who owns a toy idea. It all ran out of a warehouse at 4400 Tejasco Street in San Antonio, the same 78218 ZIP printed on this card. Play-By-Play was delisted from Nasdaq in May 2001 and Torres resigned as chairman that June; the company's European arm carried the name forward from Valencia, Spain, and was bought by the Spanish toy maker Famosa in 2006.

I found this one tucked away in a stash out of Florida and rescued it before it could slip back into obscurity — I hope you love it as much as I do.