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

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

SPEAKER_2 (0:08)

You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio.

Carol Massar (0:15)

Who knew but flag football is having a moment?

SPEAKER_4 (0:17)

It is having a moment. It's going to be in the Olympics, next Olympics.

Carol Massar (0:20)

I am kind of blown away. 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 tell as she often does here at Bloomberg. She's here in our studio. All right, what is going on?

Amanda Mull (0:40)

A lot of girls are playing flag football.

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.

SPEAKER_4 (0:58)

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

Amanda Mull (1:04)

Yes, the NFL is honestly underwriting a lot of this, along with its investment partners, which includes some very big firms like Sixth Street and Bessemer Venture Partners.

You have a lot of money going into building infrastructure. Both 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.

Carol Massar (1:51)

I love, because I think in your story, you're right. 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? Money, is it money to be made, eyeballs to catch?

Amanda Mull (2:06)

It's a little bit of both.

Well, 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 in childhood. 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. You have decreases in participation, especially in team sports, and then you have more young people than ever, not self-identifying as sports fans.

Professional leagues of all kinds need to figure out how to get more kids playing. Then for football in particular, you have this increase in concern about head injuries, and about how playing football might affect the health of kids down the line. 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 teach kids to be future sports fans? That is all very important for the NFL.

Carol Massar (3:06)

You speak about childhood and if you grew up playing sports, I just want to-

SPEAKER_4 (3:10)

didn't you play flag football?

Carol Massar (3:11)

I did some flag football in high school. Now, this is me actually being a cheerleader, but my team made me five pictures.

SPEAKER_6 (3:17)

Oh my gosh, but I mean, that's me in the lower left. So I cheered for like basketball and football, but I played flag football in high school.

Carol Massar (3:25)

Like it was a thing. They wanted us to understand the game and play it. So I am curious because you say 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.

Amanda Mull (3:37)

Right. 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. So you have this sort of long story of women getting more interested in participating in sports and putting their daughters in sports. And, 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. And in most of the country, there wasn't any interscholastic flag infrastructure.