Last year, 43,000 girls played high school flag football in the United States. The year before, that number was roughly half. The growth is the kind that makes sports executives pay attention, and several of them already have. NFL clubs recently approved a $32 million investment in a professional flag football league. The NCAA added flag football as an Emerging Sport for Women. And the International Olympic Committee put it on the program for the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
Flag football does not feel like a fringe sport anymore. And iFlag, the company that holds the Guinness World Record for the world’s largest single flag football tournament, is building its next chapter on that shift.
This month, iFlag announced the International Flag League, a professional Flag Football League for women and men. For an organization that has spent 11 years running tournaments across the country, the move into professional play feels less like a leap and more like the next step in a plan that has been in motion for a while.
They Were Paying Women Before It Was a Talking Point
Here is the detail that tends to stop people. iFlag was the first flag football organization in the country to offer cash prizes to female athletes and make those prizes equal to what men received. Not close. Equal.
This was not a recent development prompted by outside pressure or favorable press coverage. It has been company policy since early in their history, built into the way iFlag structures its events. At a time when debates about equal pay in women’s sports were still largely theoretical in most corners of the industry, iFlag had already made the call.
“Equal pay reflects our belief that athletic performance deserves equal recognition,” said Charles Davis, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of iFlag. “We established that principle early, and it will be a defining feature of the professional league.”
That same structure carries into the International Flag League. Women compete for the same prize money as men, in a league built with their participation as a priority rather than an addition.
A Million Athletes Later
Before any of this, iFlag had to prove it could actually run events at scale. Over 11 years, the organization hosted more than one million athletes across open invitation tournaments for youth, high school, collegiate, and adult divisions throughout the United States. Those are not just impressive numbers. They represent the operational foundation on which the professional league is being built.
In January 2025, the organization set the Guinness World Record for the largest single flag football tournament ever held. The record formalized what people inside the sport already knew. iFlag could put a lot of people on a field and make it work.
“We did not arrive at the professional league by accident,” Davis said. “Every tournament we have run and every athlete we have served has been part of building toward this.”
What the League Actually Looks Like
The International Flag League will feature accelerated seasons with standardized format of 5v5 and equal prize money across men’s and women’s divisions. Most early players are expected to come from within iFlag’s existing tournament community, which gives the league an experienced roster from day one. Markets, schedules, and media partnerships will be announced as agreements are confirmed.
“We are not building a league in isolation,” Davis said. “We are extending a system that already works, for athletes who are already here, in a sport that is finally getting the recognition it has earned.”
For more information, visit the official website.
