In flag football, tackles like in American football are forbidden. Instead, the goal is to tear flags from the opponents’ belts. (picture alliance / ASSOCIATED PRESS / Orlin Wagner)
Big disappointment for the men’s national flag football team: At the World Championship in Lahti (Finland), the team coached by national coach Florian Berrenberg was eliminated in the round of 16. As reigning European champions, the team had actually expected more. The 20:34 defeat against Great Britain meant an early exit. The match for eleventh place against Japan was also lost 26:39, so that the German team had to settle for twelfth place.
The German women also failed in the round of 16. After seven wins in a row, they lost 16:19 to Italy in the round of 16. In the end, they finished ninth.
Grom: “Potential not reached”
“We cannot be satisfied with the result,” said Torsten Grom, director of the national flag football teams, on Deutschlandfunk. “We have not achieved the work we have invested and the potential that both teams have.”
Flag football is suddenly getting more and more attention. The sport will be an Olympic sport for the first time in 2028 in Los Angeles. “There is a huge boost, it is developing, but it also increases the pressure,” says Grom, seeing both sides of the coin. “In this young sport, it’s about whoever can grow faster, at the end of the day, is more successful.”
Number of teams increased rapidly
The growing attention is already noticeable, said Grom: “We have more young people and adults who want to play flag football now than ever before. Last year we had 90 teams in the adult league. Today we are talking about 150 plus a women’s league, which is holding its German championships for the first time this year. And we have roughly the same ratio for the youth teams.” This is “exactly the right development”. The decisive factor now is Olympic qualification.
Now it is also a matter of getting the appropriate sports funding from Germany. Grom already sees great progress here: “We come from a time when everyone had to pay for their own travel. Now we are already in the direction where none of the athletes, whether men or youth, who travel with us have to pay a penny for it.”
Grom added: “And in 2025, when we are an Olympic athlete, there will be a similar kind of support. For us, that means we can play our sport with a national team for the first time without the athletes having to pay any costs. This means we can choose very differently. We can look at the players purely based on their performance and don’t have to take into account whether they can really afford the trip.”
Sports promotion a “huge challenge”
The sports funding structure is a “huge challenge,” said Grom. “The concepts that have to be written for this as a sport that perhaps does not have the necessary background in terms of personnel are very complex.” But he also sees positive aspects here: “In the end, it also takes the sport a little further. The content that is in there also puts the structures of where we want to go in writing. That means it has great added value that the person reading it also understands where we want to go as a sport.”
In the short term, German flag football would like to at least get back on the winner’s podium. The next European Championship is in 2025. “We always aim for a medal, gold,” said Grom. “But we must not forget: the other teams are not sleeping.”
