Flag Football Is Taking Over High Schools, and Soon the Olympics

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0:15 Who knew, but flag football is having a moment.

0:17 It is having a moment. It's going to be in the Olympics.

0:19 Next Olympics. I am kind of blown away.

0:22 All right, so youth flag participation is stored in an almost impossibly short time, especially among girls. Let's just get right to it, because I'm like, huh? But not so, huh? So let's get to it with Amanda Mull. She's senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek. She's got another amazing tale, as she often does here at Bloomberg.

0:37 She's here. In our studio. All right. What is going on?

0:40 A lot of girls are playing flag football, you know, elementary school age, middle school, all the way through high school and even some college. Now, more colleges are adding teams in a really short period of time. Girls participation in flag football has just gone absolutely through the roof.

0:58 And also, though, there's a lot of investment money coming in from places that you might not expect, like the NFL.

1:04 Yes, the NFL is honestly underwriting a lot of this, along with its investment partners, which include some very big firms like Sixth Street and Bessemer Venture Partners. You have a lot of money going into building infrastructure. That means youth, that means high school, college, and a pro league that is scheduled to launch in 2027. So you have a lot of money flooding into this sport in order to make, you know, interscholastic teams, to make club teams, to make rec teams, to send kits of equipment to local schools so that they can play flag in gym class and learn how the rules are different than tackle football. So you have this infrastructure hiding in plain sight that has been built by the NFL.

1:51 I love, because I think in your story you write, why would the NFL want hundreds of millions of dollars poured into a game that, by its very nature, seems to grant the most common criticisms of the league's main product, the tackle football is too violent, too complex, and too macho?

2:02 Money. Is it money to be made? Eyeballs to catch?

2:06 It's a little bit of both. Something that has been fascinating to me for a long time is that when you look at who becomes a sports fan, it's almost always people who played a sport, any sport, And you have a situation right now across pro sports, not just the NFL, where a lot of kids are not playing sports that they would have played a generation ago.

2:31 You have a.

2:31 Decreased system of participation, especially in team sports. And then you have more young people than ever not self-identifying as sports fans. So professional leagues of all kinds need to figure out how to get more kids playing. And then for football in particular, you have this, uh, increase in concern about head injuries and about how playing football might affect the, uh, the health of kids down the line.

2:54 So you have more parents who are like, my kid's not going to play. So how do you teach kids about football, teach kids to love football and, And teach kids to be future sports fans. That is all very important for the NFL.

3:06 You know, you speak about childhood and if you grew up playing sports. I just want to, you know, I actually played. Didn't you play flag football? I did some flag football in high school. Now, this is me actually being a cheerleader, but my team made me five pictures. Oh, my gosh. Look at this photo. That's me in the lower left.

3:20 Aw. so I cheered for like basketball and football but I played flag football in high school like it was a thing they wanted us to understand the game and play it so I am curious because you said this has kind of been long in coming yes there's the NFL but there's been other things at play that have brought this to light right.

3:37 The you know Women's sports in general, which is a subject of a big package of stories in our November issue of Businessweek, has been growing for a long time since Title IX passed in 1972 when schools were having to find more ways to get female athletes on the field in order to be in compliance with federal law.

3:58 So you have this sort of long story of women getting more interested in participating in sports and putting their daughters in sports. But there's never really been a good way to do that on a grand scale in football because women generally don't play tackle football. There's never been a big push to get them into tackle football as participants.

4:16 And in most of the country, there wasn't any interscholastic flag infrastructure. It wasn't a sanctioned championship sport basically anywhere. So the NFL has put a lot of effort into funding drives to get it sanctioned in states across the country so that it can be part of school sports. And, you know, now that is playing out where these kids want to go to college and play sports. And, you know, colleges also need to be in compliance with Title IX, and they want to increase activities to attract more students, especially for small schools that are tuition dependent. So spinning up these teams is suddenly in the best interest of a lot of different players. And then the NFL also, I think, wants a piece of the WNBA pie. They

5:05 want to be able to launch a women's league that can attract fans in the same way that the WNBA has.

5:11 All right, Amanda, well, for this story, you went and visited a tournament. There were people in from all over the world. Will you describe this? It was so charming.

5:19 Yes, I had such a great time reporting this story. And it was one of those things where it's like you really have to see this to believe how big of a phenomenon it has become. So I went to Indiana in July to go to the NFL Flag Championships, which is this mammoth tournament with 350 teams, both girls and boys and co-ed teams competing. you know, teams from as far away as New Zealand, because flag has had a big international pickup. It's a simple game. You don't need a lot of equipment. You don't need, you know, a roster of 53 people. So you can, it's a lot easier to spread the sport. And what I saw at this tournament was just so many kids having so much fun. Structurally, it varies from tackle football in that

6:06 like The players that you get are like the personality positions. The five on five format is it's wide receivers. It's defensive backs. It's quarterbacks.

6:15 It's pass rushers.

6:16 So you get a lot of like the big, exciting action of tackle football, the downfield passing, the interceptions.

6:23 Yes.

6:24 Yeah.

6:25 You got to be able to spin it.

6:27 Were you a quarterback? I don't even remember what I played. I don't think so.

6:32 So you get these like really exciting, quick games that are full of downfield passing. Two of the games that I watched, the first play from scrimmage was a long touchdown pass straight into the end zone. Um, it's super fun to watch. These girls are having so much fun. They have so much swagger. Um, it was really just like a joy to behold these athletes getting to compete like this in a way that like didn't exist five years ago.

6:54 Before we wrap up.

6:55 I mean, for anything to kind of grow big, I feel like in sports, there has to be broadcast rights. Yes.

7:00 So what's happening there?

7:02 Well, the, the tournament that I watched, even though it was a youth sports tournament, um, The NFL, of course, has media partners. They have broadcast partners. So the tournament itself was broadcast many of the games, especially in the older divisions across ABC, ESPN and the ESPN family of streaming services. The girls championship game was the highest rated of those broadcasts. It was on ABC in the middle or like early on Sunday evening in July.

7:27 And it.

7:28 Had more than a million viewers across platforms. It had a real audience. It's fun to watch. You pick it up quick if you know about tackle football. So the 2027 Pro League is still being sort of spun up. I've heard some doubts as to whether or not it's going to launch on time. I don't have any... new reporting on that, but it will certainly have, uh, have the benefit of the NFL's advocacy in broadcasting.

7:52 Just got 20 seconds.

7:52 You talk about moms and their daughters wanting this to do it, but it's the dads who get really emotional just really quickly, right? Yes.

7:58 The dads were so, I talked to so many dads who like, uh, who like nearly cried in front of me. Like I felt like I was going to nearly cry sometimes that these dads were so excited to be able to share the sport with their daughter in a way they never thought they could.

8:10 I told you, another great story from Amanda Moll. Thank you so much. It's on the Bloomberg. Check it out. Very, you know, great little stories from some of the different players. It's just great. Amanda Moll, senior reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek. Check out her story. It's on the Bloomberg and at Bloomberg.com.