Soccer Kid is a side-scrolling platform game developed by Telegames for the Game Boy Advance. Soccer Kid is a platform game where players take control of the titular character, travelling across the world to retrieve and restore the World Cup from the clutches of the alien pirate Scab, who plans to add it to his ever-growing collection. By pressing different buttons at the title screen, the player can change the colours of their character’s clothes to represent their favorite team.
Each country has three levels that the player must navigate through. The player character can perform various types of soccer moves such as runs, shots, bicycle kicks, headers, and other sorts of moves to either advance in the level, get to hard-to-reach areas, or eliminate enemies by using his soccer ball as the main tool. The player starts out with two hearts, but by opening random chests scattered throughout the game, they can get more hearts. At the end of each third level, the player must fight a boss, based on stereotypical people associated with their respective country.
However, the player must always explore each level to find soccer cards, which are crucial to getting the cup at the end of the game. Once a country is completed and all the cards in that country are collected, Soccer Kid is transported to a bonus level where he must collect all the food within a limited time for a piece of the cup to be obtainable. If all heart pieces are lost, the player character is respawned on a determined checkpoint after losing a life, and once all lives are lost, the game is over, though there is an option of continuing. Depending on the version being played, progress is saved differently.