NFL to Get Into Flag Football

The NFL plans to launch women's and men's professional flag football leagues, Commissioner Roger Goodell said Thursday, in line with the league priority of trying to attract young fans, male and female. The timeline he outlined would see the leagues created ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, which will feature flag football for the first time. "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 at the Leaders in Sport conference at Twickenham Stadium in London.

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The league sponsors youth flag football around the US for boys and girls ages 4 to 17, per Yahoo Sports. "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," Goodell said. "That's an important infrastructure that we need to create." The NFL's first youth flag football initiative was launched in the early 1990s and included an official camp held in 1994 at the Patriots' Foxboro Stadium.