Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

NFL pushes flag football as an Olympic sport

OLY-2022-BEIJING-VENUE

A general view of the Olympic rings during the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games at the Yanqing National Alpine Skiing Centre in Yanqing on February 15, 2022. (Photo by Jeff PACHOUD / AFP) (Photo by JEFF PACHOUD/AFP via Getty Images)

AFP via Getty Images

Football can’t be a truly global sport until it’s part of the Olympics. Maybe it eventually will be.

Via Jabari Young of CNBC.com, the NFL wants to get football into the every-four-year worldwide competition. The goal is to make flag football part of the Olympics.

Damani Leech, the COO of NFL International, recently told Young that the league hopes to persuade the Olympics to adopt flag football as an official sport, as soon as 2028.

“If flag football becomes an Olympic sport, more countries will invest in playing that sport,” Leech said, via FrontOfficeSports.com.

To make it an Olympic sport, however, more countries already need to be invested. And it needs to be a sport played both by men and women. That’s what makes flag football a potentially more viable alternative than full-pads tackle football.

The possibility of football in the Olympics has come up from time to time. I’d prefer it to be a sport in the Winter Olympics, played on snow. Whichever version of the Olympics has it, football definitely should be in the Olympics.