When the NFL handed the ball to flag soccer in a Tremendous Bowl advert in 2023, each gamers and the league have been eyeing a purpose line within the distance.
Two years later, the Nationwide Soccer League and its artistic companions at 72andSunny have positioned women and girls’s flag soccer on the heart of their newest Tremendous Bowl advert. The 2-minute “NFL Flag 50” airs instantly after halftime and takes viewers again to 1985, the place Liberty Excessive College and U.S. Ladies’ Junior Nationwide Workforce flag soccer participant Ki’Lolo Westerlund reveals up as the brand new woman at school to the tune of Yello’s “Oh Yeah” (aka day-bow-bow).
Awash in massive TV perms, male jocks hoarding the varsity jackets, and seemingly little information of the Title IX schooling modification a decade earlier prohibiting sex-based discrimination in faculties, the ‘80s setting is slowly dragged into the current day by Westerlund and a few noteworthy teammates.
With closely disguised former NFL punter and present ESPN persona Pat McAfee as a principal excited that women’ flag soccer has develop into a varsity sport, this stand-in for a John Hughes film highschool will get an schooling from flag gamers, together with Serenity Simon from Miami’s Palmetto Excessive College, Keiser College and U.S Ladies’s nationwide workforce participant Ashlea Klam, and U.S. flag soccer veteran and 2022 Tremendous Bowl advert star Vanita Krouch. Collectively, the flag soccer gamers rock the varsity’s retrograde jocks like a hurricane as Scorpions present the soundtrack.
“The most important distinction is the primary [Super Bowl flag football ad] sparked the worldwide pleasure, and it was all concerning the Olympics and the enormous stage,” mentioned Marissa Solis, svp of world model and advertising and marketing for the NFL. “This time it’s extra private: It’s about highschool, seeing the journey of those younger girls, and making it an official highschool sport, and it begins in native communities.”
Just like the NFL Tremendous Bowl adverts earlier than it, this one is replete with present gamers, together with the Cleveland Browns’ Myles Garrett and the Minnesota Vikings’ Justin Jefferson (an NFL flag soccer ambassador). Plus, there are alumni akin to former operating again Marshawn Lynch—who’s thrown assist behind girls’s soccer and the Ladies’s Nationwide Soccer Convention (WNFC) deal with league. Not like previous adverts, nevertheless, NFL expertise serves largely as comedian aid for NFL world flag soccer ambassadors, together with Brazil’s Gabi Bankhardt, France’s Elisa De Santis, Australia’s Kodie Fuller, Germany’s Mona Stevens, and Mexico’s Tania Rincon.
