Flag football will be an Olympic sport when the quadrennial event comes to Los Angeles in 2028. By then, the NFL hopes to have professionalized the sport.
Speaking in London on Thursday ahead of an International Series game between the Cleveland Browns and Minnesota Vikings, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell discussed the league’s plans to launch a professional flag football league.
“We’re committed to creating a women’s professional league, and a men’s professional flag league. 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 said, via the Associated Press. “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. 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’s comments come seven months after former NFL chief media officer Brian Rolapp (who is now CEO of the PGA Tour) first publicly floated the idea. “We do believe as it grows in popularity, that there is room for more leagues, including a professional league, and that would clearly have a media package as well,” Rolapp told Front Office Sports in February. “We’re big believers in flag football for a lot of reasons,” he continued. “It’s clearly going to be an Olympic sport. So we think it has international potential. One of the greatest things about flag football is half of our fans right now are female—but don’t really have access to playing the game competitively. We are now providing that.”
With the sport set to enter the Olympics in just a few years, it makes sense that the NFL would like to lineup a professional league with that event. And with the league even moving towards a flag football competition for the Pro Bowl every year, the NFL clearly sees a fair bit of merit in the sport.
About Drew Lerner
Drew Lerner is a staff writer for Awful Announcing and an aspiring cable subscriber. He previously covered sports media for Sports Media Watch. Future beat writer for the Oasis reunion tour.