NFL 2026: The League’s Flag Football Long Game Is Paying Dividends

from on 2026-09-11 11:00 (#78ANC)

Now that theNFL, the richest sports league in the world, sits unchallenged atop American sports, that lofty perch raises its own questions: How can you sustain growth and popularity without falling prey to complacency-or greed? How do you further grow a successful league while fending off platform decay and lawsuits? What threats are out there, and what are the league's tactics to defang them? What are some unchartered territories for the league? In its annual NFL preview, Sportico analyzes how the NFL handles life as a monopoly. Click here to read the series.

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For the NFL, all it took was a cheap nylon belt with big detachable ribbons-and $100 million.

Flag football is suddenly everywhere. NFL Flag leagues crowd parks with kids and their families on fall weekends. Girls varsity flag football is now entrenched in U.S. high schools. There's online debate on whether Team USA has a better chance of winning a 2028 Olympic gold medal using flag specialists or NFL players. And in a preseason press conference, NFL execs fielded nearly as many questions about flag as they did for TV negotiations.

Just 10 years after league owners were spooked by the twin specters of concussions hurting youth participation (a real phenomenon) and Colin Kaepernick turning away viewers (a debunked one), flag football checks a lot of boxes for assuaging the NFL's long-term concerns.

College football's disruption from the death of amateurism? Let the NFL tell you about flag's expanding intercollegiate presence.
Concussion fears for kids? Flag football is the fastest growing youth participation sport; an estimated 1.5 million kids played it in 2025. That's happening in tandem with more modest rises in youth tackle football in the past three years.
Reaching more women? Girls varsity high school flag football is sanctioned in 24 states right now, and 1.1 million people watched NFL Flag's high-school girls national title game on ABC.
The elusive grail of NFL internationalization? League officials point to 100,000 registered flag football players in the U.K., a fierce rivalry between the U.S. and Mexico in the elite women's game, and a diminishing gap between the U.S. men's national team and squads from countries like Italy. And you may have heard about the 2028 Olympics. NFL players certainly have. A league survey showed more than 200 players from over 25 nations have expressed interest in representing their countries in international flag competition.

Josh Harris, the private equity financier and owner of the Washington Commanders, gushes about the rise of flag football. The NFL believes-and I believe-that flag is an incredible complementary part of its ecosystem," Harris told Sportico this summer. Not everyone can play tackle because of the size and equipment needs. That's the biggest part of why the NFL is investing in flag."

Like many other NFL teams, the Commanders have spent money on local programs, working with girls flag in Maryland and Washington, D.C. You're more likely to like a sport if you've played it, and the reality is that very few women play [tackle] football," said Harris, whose portfolio includes the youth-sports-focused firm Unrivaled Sports. Then there's international. ... Flag is much easier to play internationally. It's a few flags and a football, versus pads, 11 people and everything else."

Or as Brian Flinn, the NFL's senior VP of global flag football, put it, Flag football is certainly an entry point and a focus for us to introduce the game around the world."

The NFL's flag wave didn't just happen, and it didn't just happen in the last decade.

The league sowed the seeds of the current boom in the mid-1990s. Yes, the NFL had established itself as America's game, riding high on the success of America's team-the Troy Aikman-Emmitt Smith Dallas Cowboys-and supplanted MLB, the national pastime, because in the go-go 1980s and 90s, people no longer had pastimes. They had passions, which the NFL satisfied: speed, violence, tribalism and gambling.

Yet the NFL was worried about itself being supplanted, maybe not as the most popular sport on TV, but as a leading light of sports culture, and as a game kids wanted to play, watch and emulate.

The NFL was the No Fun League-a man's game, a dad's game, stern and rough, with touchdown celebrations earning the same penalties as dangerous late hits. There were devastating reports of the toll tackle football took on legendary players like Jim Otto, John Henry Johnson and Mike Webster, some with mangled limbs and spines, others with mangled brains. And kids were turning away.

Youth tackle football participation numbers steadily declined, while the NFL's bread-and-butter developmental tool, high-school football, struggled with rising costs to maintain fields and equipment.

At the same time, the NBA-fresh off its 1992 Olympic Dream Team moment-filled the role as America's coolest sport, thanks to a genius commissioner in David Stern, and the world's most marketable athlete in Michael Jordan. Meanwhile, non-stick-and-ball activities like skateboarding and video games were coming up fast, laying claim to young people's time and attention.

So the NFL turned to the era's standard bearer for monetizing youth cool-MTV-raiding Sara Levinson from the network and appointing her as president of NFL Properties. Her group surveyed fans and found an untapped resource in maybe the least cool venue imaginable: gym class.

Flag football, a ridiculously cheap, easy-to-learn version of the game, had been a staple of elementary and middle school PE programs for decades. It was familiar and safe. No parents worried that their kids would become paralyzed, brain-injured or hooked on pain pills as a result of flag football.

With a few tweaks, Levinson and her team thought the league could use flag to help reverse the disturbing decline in youth interest. Just make sure it's inexpensive, accessible and most important, fun.

Levinson brought in Scott Lancaster from the suddenly hot sport of soccer. Lancaster had worked with U.S. Soccer developing youth programs, and by the time he came into the NFL in 1995, he said, Soccer was basically kicking football's ass from a participatory standpoint."

So the NFL sought to kick back by similarly targeting young athletes.

Flag was not only cheap, but it was also co-ed. We had been ignoring half the potential fan base, and that's females," Lancaster said. It was something that could be attractive for both moms and kids, and we wanted to promote the speed of the game, the finesse of the game."

This wasn't an easy sell. We'd go to owners' meetings to pitch it, and a lot of them looked at me cross-eyed," Lancaster said. They'd say, Why would we do that? We're a tackle football league.'"

NFL Properties argued that through flag, the league could get kids playing, get them enjoying the sport and then reintroduce tackle football. Sara and I both took a lot of bullets from that," Lancaster said.

But Lancaster had the help of two influential coaches: Hall of Famer Bill Walsh and Pete Carroll, then an upstart. That was two really good disciples who were able to go out and push it," he said.

Walsh and Carroll helped close the deal, and the league and the NFLPA combined to commit an astonishing $100 million in TV money to grassroots football, with a big boost for youth flag.

With the backing of NFL teams and the help of an inclusive rulebook, NFL Flag exploded.

The rules mandated that every player touch the ball in every game. They also made every player eligible to receive or run with the ball-no kids toiled away in the linemen trenches. It was something the kids took to heart," Lancaster said, and all our research showed us that they would."

Coaches taught the sport, but they were supposed to let the kids run the show during the games, with overzealous parenting frowned on. I'd tell people, It's going to be in the Olympics one day; it's going to be a pro sport,'" said Lancaster, now a sports consultant. And people looked at me like I was crazy."

He recalled George Young, the legendary GM of the Lawrence Taylor-era Giants, saying, There's no way that's ever going to happen."

But, Lancaster said, the teams actually took that flame and kept going. I give them a lot of credit."

Team investment helped when the league and union's initial $100 million fund ran down, and flag participation declined, in the early 2010s. But the baseline of players and programs held, the league reignited its flag funding, and the growth of flag resumed.

The youth game's popularity begat high school programs, which have mushroomed. It's created a growing flag football industry, with companies like RCX and iFlag finding success organizing youth tournaments, high-school talent showcases and international competitions. That success is in turn spawning college programs.

The Eastern College Athletic Conference, an association of more than 200 NCAA schools across all three divisions, is an early adopter. Many of its members, all in the Northeast, are primary members of other conferences, but compete in the ECAC in sports such as hockey. The conference also has a tradition of presiding over sports not governed by the NCAA. We look for these types of opportunities," ECAC commissioner Dan Coonan said. We jumped on esports a few years ago, and we started from scratch." Now the conference has 340 esports members.

I saw what flag football was doing at the youth level," he said, and saw that the Olympics were going to have flag football, and I'm like, College athletics is late to the party.'"

In the summer of 2025, Coonan called the Jets, Giants and the NFL inquiring about partnerships to start a college league. All of them returned my calls, which was really telling," he said. But nobody had more urgency than the Jets."

Jets owner Woody Johnson backed the idea with a grant from the Betty Wold Johnson Foundation, the family charity named for his late mother. The $1 million commitment jumpstarted the ECAC's inaugural women's flag football season last spring, with 15 teams competing. Marymount won the title-and the trophy known as The Betty"-at the Jets training facility in New Jersey.

Next season, the Jets ECAC Women's Flag Football League (yes, the Jets are the title sponsor) will expand to 29 teams, one of them being Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey, which has brought in 17 players for its first season in the spring. We were hoping for 10 to 12," said FDU athletic director Jason Young. But New Jersey is turning into a hotbed for talent."

Young said flag is a great fit for his existing campus facilities, for gender equity purposes and as a student recruiting tool. But FDU's embrace is about more than a Title IX and heads-in-beds" play. We need to be a community asset," he said. Can we drive more flag football youth teams to the FDU campus to participate in some way shape or form so that they know we're here? Can we get more camps and clinics so that that kids are coming to Hackensack in the summer?"

While most early flag adopters are lower-division or small D-I programs such as FDU, power conference schools are warming to the sport. The College Football Playoff will host a women's flag showcase run by iFlag during the CFP 2027 championship week in Las Vegas, where Nebraska's fledgling program will take on the ECAC's Manhattan. That should be an intriguing matchup," Coonan said.

The NFL isn't content to see college flag football, or even the Olympics, as the sport's apex. The league announced a $32 million investment in a partnership with TMRW Sports, the Tiger Woods-Rory McIlroy company, to start men's and women's professional leagues.

I think it's an extremely smart business move," said Jasmine Robinson, a managing partner at the investment firm Monarch Collective. The daughter of an NFL player, Robinson played varsity flag football in Florida before going on to earn degrees at Harvard and Stanford. She knows first-hand how much fan affinity the game creates for women. Flag football came in and really allowed the opportunity to build that lived experience-that memory of playing the game and relationships with teammates and the big plays," Robinson said. I think that makes it a lot more fun to turn on the TV and watch on Sundays."

Financiers hungry for sports investments are seeing that growth and responding. There's now so many new funds launching to invest capital into sports," she said. There's a lot of dry powder to be put to work. There's definitely a lot that's exciting about what the NFL is building, just because of that heft that they bring in the market."

While a pro flag league faces many of the same hurdles as other emerging sports-such as consistent media coverage and whether it will be screen-friendly-the NFL's backing makes it different in investors' eyes.

They see the NFL isn't content with using flag as a mere developmental tool. As Harris, the Commanders owner and private equity baron, said, Obviously, if the NFL didn't think it was going to do well financially, they wouldn't do it."

And Robinson sees that as a huge driver of interest. Right now, she said, You wouldn't bet against the NFL on much of anything."

Additional reporting by Eben Novy-Williams.

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