The NFL is set to launch professional flag football leagues for both men and women within the next couple of years, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announced at the Leaders in Sport conference in London’s Twickenham Stadium on Thursday, as first reported by the Associated Press. The new leagues aim to debut ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Summer Olympics, where flag football will make its Olympic debut as an official sport. Goodell expressed optimism about the significant interest in establishing these leagues and highlighted the growing enthusiasm for flag football worldwide.
“We’re committed to creating a women’s professional league, and a men’s professional flag league,” Goodell said. “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 noted the rapid growth in flag-football participation at youth and collegiate levels, underscoring efforts to create a structured pipeline starting from youth leagues through high school and college, eventually reaching professional play. “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.
