Ready or not, here it comes.
An NFL-owned professional flag football league is coming soon.
NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said today in London that a flag football league will be in place within the next couple years, which would put its launch ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where flag football will make its debut as an Olympic sport.
“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.
Goodell said the NFL sees strong interest in flag football, from fans and from participants.
“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,” Goodell said. “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.”
The NFL has invested heavily in promoting flag football. It advocated for adding flag football to the Olympics, it has pushed for flag football to become a girls’ varsity sport in high schools in all 50 states, and it has turned the Pro Bowl into a flag football game. With a flag football league in the works, the league is going all-in on flag football.
Here’s the NFL press release from which the above story was taken. Not much to add here, it makes sense for the NFL to diversify its product and also for them to branch out into women’s sports. I could totally see a women’s pro flag football league being a success. I assume the goal is to have something fully launched before the 2028 Olympics, so we won’t have to wait long.
I suspect that flag football is going to be the future of the sport, if it’s going to have a future long term.
I’ve lived in Texas since I was 7 years old, so that meant a steady diet of football- HS, college, pro for most of my life. I enjoy it, but the evidence for even routine contact causing cumulative brain damage worries me. If I had a son, I’d be very reluctant to allow him to play the sport, especially pre-HS. It seems like many actual parents feel the same way. That’s why I can see getting people interested in flag football as a way to transition the sport into a form that’s less damaging to the athletes.