‘It’s gone berserk’: flag football rapidly catching on in UK

Flag football, a non-contact version of American football, is rapidly catching on in the UK with a surge in the number of schools involved and participation numbers set to hit 100,000 by 2026.

Fuelled by an energetic campaign by the New York-based NFL to encourage young people in Britain to try the less violent alternative, teams with names such as the Northants Ducks, the South Coast Spitfires and the London Fruit Bats are experiencing rising demand.

School PE teachers have reported increased interest among children driven in part by the game’s rising global profile as well as parents’ concerns that rugby and full-contact American football pose too great a risk of brain injury. This year, 343 schools entered events for the UK NFL Flag National Championship, a 78% annual increase.

“In the last three years it has gone berserk,” said Jay Taylor, who founded the Fruit Bats flag football club in Ealing, west London. “Flag football has a chance of sticking here, because there is nothing like it.”

The profile of flag football has also been boosted by the International Olympic Committee’s decision to include the sport for the first time at the 2028 Los Angeles Games and by the NFL’s switch of its end-of-season showpiece Pro Bowl match from full contact to flag.

It is one of several fast-growing new sports in the UK that include pickleball, a version of short tennis using a solid bat that has become hugely popular in California and is now catching from Cornwall to Newcastle. Padel, a cross between tennis and squash beloved of professional footballers, is also spreading with the former Wimbledon champion Andy Murray among those opening courts.

Flag football is a version of the game in which defenders make “tackles” by grabbing a fabric “flag” attached by Velcro on every player’s belt rather than the kind of crunching physical assault that parents, and doctors, increasingly fear can cause long-term brain damage. Instead of 11 fully armoured players on the pitch for each side, five to seven take the field in just shorts, T-shirts and trainers. The principles of the game are the same – the offence trying to advance the ball through a series of pre-planned plays while the defence tries to stop them.

The Fruit Bats already have 70 players aged 14 and under. Compared with soccer, which is played by more than 3.3 million children, the chances of success are higher. A significant draw appears to be the NFL’s annual invitation to the best school teams to compete in an international tournament in Florida.

Taylor said the NFL and several of its professional teams were also quick to support schools and clubs by offering balls and flag belts. The Jacksonville Jaguars have been promoting “Jag Tag” in the UK for several years. This year the New York Jets, owned by Donald Trump’s former ambassador to the UK, Woody Johnson, and the Chicago Bears announced an expansion of their girls’ tag football league in the UK.

Jacob and Leia, both 11, are members of the Little Ealing primary school team that won the national title this year and are due to compete at the February 2025 NFL Flag World Championships in Florida.

Leia, who played her first game when she was 10, said: “I never knew the sport before. You get to run much more and there’s a playbook which is quite fun and the quarterback gets to decide what play we do.

“You need to be able to jump high, get into space, watch the ball, run fast and dodge players.”

Jacob added: “You need to make sure you listen well and really understand what you are doing.”

Amid the school’s success, the PE teacher Bobby Behzadi said he had been inundated with a “ridiculous” number of players keen to join next year’s team, their interest boosted by the possibility of a trip abroad. But part of the popularity is the range of roles on each team suiting people with different strengths.

“Speed helps, but the thinkers can get into it too,” Behzadi said. “It’s a game of cat and mouse. There’s a lot of decision making and exploiting and finding weaknesses in the opposition defence. We have people who might not be the fastest runner but have good arms and can play quarterback.”