It’s the high-octane sport that will make its Olympic debut in Los Angeles in 2028. It’s played by 20 million people in more than 100 countries and is being propelled by the global marketing muscle of the multi-billion-dollar NFL. Flag football is taking off across the world, but most Australians might not have heard about it.

“I think in Australia, we’re a bit naive to the rest of the world in terms of what’s going on internationally in sport participation,” says Wade Kelly, CEO of American Football Australia, the national governing body of tackle gridiron and flag football. “This is a global phenomenon that’s only getting bigger and bigger.”

Flag football is the non-contact form of American football. Five players per side wear belts with flags that can be pulled out by opponents rather than tackling the player with the ball. A down occurs when a flag is removed, the ball-carrier steps out of bounds, drops the ball or falls to the ground. Teams start at their own five-yard line and have four downs to reach halfway, then another four if they pass that point to score a touchdown, worth six points.

“Australians are born for this game,” Kelly says. “It’s a 360-degree pressure game where you have to get downfield, turn around and catch a ball above your head. That’s AFL, that’s netball,” Kelly says. “Then you add in the skills we grow up with as touch footy players and Oztag players. On the international scene we’re new to flag – but we’re good at it.”

Melbourne-born former Essendon VFLW player Olivia Manfre knows just how useful her Aussie rules skills are on the flag football field. She’s a pioneer, as the first Australian woman to be offered a scholarship to play American football at a US university.

Manfre is in her first semester living at Southwestern College in Kansas, where she’s studying a chemistry degree she estimates would cost $80,000 per year were she not on a scholarship. The college pathway has long been an option for talented male AFL players to switch codes to the NFL – San Francisco 49ers’ Mitch Wishnowsky and Chicago Bears’ Tory Taylor are two recent examples. However, it is a sign of the times that flag football is booming enough to be offering women similar opportunities.

“Obviously the Olympics is a goal of mine and I think being over here in college and getting consistent training and games against top players that I wouldn’t otherwise get is going to put me in the best position to get selected,” Manfre says.

Manfre caught the eye of college scouts during her green and gold debut at the Asia-Oceania Championships in 2023. Her highlights reel included a hat-trick in a single game, helping Australia to win a silver medal.

Manfre was somewhat prepared for the high-performance environment after starring for Australia at the world championships in Finland in August this year. She had been playing for Essendon in the VFLW before she moved to Kansas in July, she admits five field training sessions plus three weight sessions per week in pre-season has been pushing her game and body to the next level.

“Flag football is so explosive; every play is a 100% sprint. I would get to Thursday and Friday and my legs wouldn’t give anything else. It really took a while to adapt,” she said.

The International Olympic Committee announced in 2023 that flag football would feature on the Los Angeles Olympic program, and NFL players soon began voicing their interest in playing. If franchises allow their players to compete, many believe the US team could become the equivalent of American basketball’s 1992 Olympic Dream Team.

There is a clear pathway for participants and fans between flag and contact football – one the NFL is seeking to leverage. NFL Australia introduced NFL Flag to 10 schools across the country two years ago, hoping to grow participation and ensure flag football remains an Olympic sport for Brisbane 2032. That program has since exploded to 250 schools and more than 50,000 students playing flag in 2024 – culminating in a national championship that was held on Friday on the Gold Coast. The winning team, Kew Primary School from Victoria, will be flown to Orlando, Florida in January to compete against other international teams at the NFL’s annual Pro Bowl Games.

Adults, too, are switching codes and taking up flag football with gusto – evidenced last weekend at the inaugural Asia-Oceania club championship held in Melbourne, dubbed Capture the Flag. An impressive 26 teams competed (17 men’s and nine women’s), with 11 of those travelling from outside Australia. Many of the players were national representatives, including Australian and New Zealand stars from the 2024 World Championships.

Kelly believes it will be fascinating to watch how the Australian teams evolve when other sports’ athletes are inevitably tempted to code-hop by the prize of an Olympic medal. He claims there has already been interest from big-name stars to join the high-performance flag football programme, though he refuses to be drawn on further details.

“Our NRL Kangaroos warm up with an American football. The AFL stars are obsessed with it. A lot of them go over to watch games in the US in our offseason. Our sporting superstars are fans of this sport already,” Kelly said.

“Recently we’ve had some of the biggest names in AFL and NRL reach out to us and ask how they might be able to play for Australia. That goes to the scale of exactly how big this will be.”