The National Football League is sponsoring a brand-new flag football league ahead of the sport’s debut at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
“We’re committed to creating a women’s professional league, and a men’s professional flag league,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Thursday, according to Sports Illustrated. “We’ve had a great deal of interest in that and I expect that we’ll be able to do that, launch that, in the next couple of years.”
Goodell added that the new league can serve as a stepping stone to encourage young people to consider playing NFL-style football later on.
“The demand is there. We’re seeing colleges in the states and universities internationally also that want to make it a part of their program,” the commissioner added.
The NFL already sponsors several flag football teams in various cities across the nation for players from ages four to 17. The league is now looking to expand on that base.
“If you set that structure up where there’s youth leagues, going into high school, into college, and then professional, I think you can develop a system of scale. That’s an important infrastructure that we need to create,” Goodell said.
Flag football is set to make its debut at the 2028 Summer Games in L.A. with USA Football in the van.
“The expanding global opportunities for flag football are reflective of the sport’s staggering growth. In the United States alone, an annual participation study from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) in 2022 showed 7.1 million people participated in flag football, while more than half a dozen states have sanctioned girls’ flag football as a varsity sport. Internationally, flag football is played by 20 million people in more than 100 countries,” USA Football noted.
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