The 2028 Summer Olympics, which will be hosted in Los Angeles, will feature new sports alongside the event’s classic competitions. Flag football, cricket, lacrosse and squash are among the sports being added.
One new sport that has generated a lot of excitement thus far among American viewers is flag football. Flag football follows many of the rules of traditional football, but replaces tackling with the removal of a player’s flag, which marks a player as down. The sport’s popularity has skyrocketed recently, as more children in the United States currently play flag football than tackle football. However, flag football has garnered significantly less interest from other countries, as American football is a distinctly American sport, providing the U.S. a competitive edge with the NFL’s outward encouragement to its players to partake in the 2028 Olympic games.
Cricket has also been added to the 2028 Olympic lineup and brings with it the largest fanbase out of the newly added sports. The sport is mainly popular in South Asia but also has fans across Europe and Asia.
Cricket’s biggest league is the Indian Premier League (IPL), which was formed in 2008 and drew over 505 million viewers in 2023. Although baseball and cricket are both ball-bat games, there are a myriad of differences. Notably, Cricket has eleven players, is played on a circular field and cricket players use a flat bat. Cricket games can also take a range of time to finish, but for the 2028 Olympics, they will be played over the course of four to five days.
Lacrosse will be in the Olympics for the first time in over 100 years. This format of the sport will be a faster-paced six versus six version, as opposed to the usual 10-a-side version. Lacrosse is most popular in North America, which would seemingly provide countries like Canada and the U.S. an advantage, but it is also played in many other countries.
Similar to flag football, the U.S. has the largest lacrosse league, the Premier Lacrosse League (PLL). PLL players are expected to participate in the Olympics, although rosters have not yet been confirmed. The addition of lacrosse to the Olympics will hopefully increase viewership and raise interest in parts of the world that have not been previously exposed to the sport.
The final sport to be added to the upcoming Olympics is squash. Squash is played in an enclosed room with a small bouncy ball and long, narrow tennis-like rackets. Although there is not a major squash league, squash has been continuously growing in popularity in the United States, as well as England, France, Australia and Canada. The 2028 Olympics will hopefully be an opportunity for top players to showcase their skills on a global stage.
The addition of five new sports for 2028 is significant, as the upcoming 2024 Summer Olympics, hosted in Paris, only features one new sport: breaking. More commonly called breakdancing, the sport debuted at Youth Olympic Games in Buenos Aires in 2018, and due to its outstanding success, was added to the 2024 Olympics.
All of these additions will bring new fans into the Olympics, which is important because viewership of the events has been declining steadily for the past couple of years. Adding new sports, especially those with a large fanbase, such as cricket, should be successful in raising viewership numbers, especially in South Asia and North America. The addition of sports that are only prominent in certain countries, such as lacrosse or squash, should also increase the amount of players and fans of these sports around the world.
