5 New Sports at LA 2028 Olympics: Complete Guide

698 extra athletes will walk into the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on July 14, 2028, dragging five Olympic debut stories behind them. Flag football, lacrosse sixes, squash, T20 cricket, and baseball/softball — the new sports at the LA 2028 Olympics — form the largest single-Games expansion of the programme since rugby sevens and golf arrived together in Rio. This is the comprehensive breakdown I've been building since the IOC voted these five in at its 141st Session in Mumbai back in October 2023. Every rule, every date, every venue, every controversy, in one guide.

The five-sport bundle isn't a random grab-bag. Three of these disciplines (baseball, softball, lacrosse) are Olympic returners. Two (flag football, squash) are true debutants. Cricket hasn't appeared since 1900 — a 128-year gap that makes it the oldest "new" sport in modern Olympic history. Put together, they're the sharpest statement the IOC has made about American television markets, youth-audience capture, and optional-sport flexibility since the Agenda 2020 reforms.

I've been tracking each of these sports individually for years at The Sports Rise. Watching them land in the same Games — at the same moment, in the same city — feels like witnessing a controlled experiment in sport-building. Which is why this guide keeps circling back to one phrase: the Olympic Gateway Effect. More on that in a minute.

Flag Football: The NFL's Olympic Audition

Flag football's path to LA 2028 is the cleanest of the five. The IOC approved the sport. The International Federation of American Football (IFAF) owns the rulebook. The NFL, after a decade of quiet positioning, finally pushed its owners to vote 32-0 in favour of player participation at the 2025 Spring League Meeting. Every hurdle that could've killed the debut has been cleared in under 18 months.

The on-field format is nothing like the NFL you watch on Sundays. Games are 5-on-5, non-contact, played on a 70 × 25 yard field with 10-yard end zones. Two 20-minute halves. Ten-player rosters per team, twelve teams total — six men's, six women's — which puts 120 athletes on the Olympic ledger. Medal games are scheduled for July 21–22, 2028 at Exposition Park Stadium, right next door to the Coliseum.

Player eligibility was the actual political fight. NFL contracts bar contact sports during the off-season, and the league had to write a custom resolution exempting Olympic flag football from that clause. The final deal — confirmed unanimously by all 32 clubs — permits one player per team to try out for their national squad, with an additional exemption for each club's designated international player. Injury protection clauses and salary-cap credits are baked in. Playing surfaces must meet NFL medical-staff minimums.

Rules sorted. Now — who's actually lacing up? Patrick Mahomes, Justin Jefferson, Tyreek Hill and Joe Burrow have all said publicly they'd compete for Team USA. Jefferson put it most honestly when he spoke to ESPN — "It's three years from now, it's three whole seasons that I'm going to have to go through. Of course, getting older, body is going to be different, but that's definitely always been a dream." Mahomes, nursing an ACL/LCL rehabilitation per recent reports, is the only marquee name with a medical question mark attached.

My read: the NFL presence is a soft guarantee for television but a hard risk for competitive balance. Team USA with three active All-Pros is a steamroller against Mexico, Austria, or Japan — the three nations with the most developed flag programmes outside North America. Expect an IFAF rule patch on "professional player count per roster" before qualifying opens in late 2027. The sport's upside is huge; the first tournament will be lopsided.

Lacrosse Sixes: The Oldest Olympic Sport With the Youngest Format

A thousand years before the IOC existed, the Haudenosaunee invented this sport. At LA 2028, they won't be allowed to play it under their own flag. On January 17, 2025, President Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau released a joint statement from the White House asking the IOC to let the six-nation Iroquois Confederacy compete as their own team. The IOC's answer hasn't moved. An IOC spokesperson told The Daily Orange: "Only National Olympic Committees (NOCs) recognised by the IOC can enter teams for the Olympic Games." Lacrosse returns to the Olympics as a medal sport for the first time since 1908 — and its inventors are still fighting to be on the field they helped create.

That tension sits on top of a format that didn't exist until 2018. World Lacrosse invented "sixes" specifically to solve the Olympic pitch problem: 6-a-side on a 70 × 36 metre pitch, four 8-minute quarters, a 30-second shot clock, no specialist positions. The compressed format runs inside 45 real-time minutes — roughly the same as a squash best-of-five, and it fits neatly into an Olympic broadcast block.

Twelve teams (six men, six women) with 11-player rosters bring 132 athletes to the Games, sharing BMO Stadium with flag football during a compact five-day round-robin. Medal days land inside the first week of competition, shielding the tournament from track-and-field's TV-ratings gravity later on.

On the field, the United States and Canada are the lacrosse superpowers. Australia, England, Japan, and either the Iroquois Nationals or Israel will fill out the men's field; a similar spread applies on the women's side. Medal predictions at this stage are noise — sixes is new enough that nobody has three years of international match data to model.

Rugby sevens entered the Olympic programme in 2009. According to World Rugby's own tracking, an estimated 30 million new fans were drawn into the sport after Rio 2016. Global rugby participation has doubled since inclusion was voted through. Women's rugby participation jumped from 200,000 to 1.7 million players in three years. That isn't a cycle of interest — it's a permanent market expansion. Every sport arriving at LA 2028 is chasing that same curve.

Squash: The Debut That Got Cut in Half

32 down to 16. That's the number that defines squash's Olympic debut. In 2025 — eight months after World Squash CEO Zena Wooldridge and US Squash had both been told in writing that the competition would be a 32-player singles draw per gender — the IOC's Olympic Programme Commission quietly halved it. Just 32 athletes total. Squash will be the smallest sport on the entire LA28 programme.

For twenty years the World Squash Federation had lobbied for Olympic inclusion. It finally got the vote for LA 2028. Then came the cut, justified on cost-effectiveness and athlete-quota grounds, announced without warning. That blow-for-blow sequence is why the squash world refuses to let this one go.

The competitive casualty is immediate. A 16-player draw means roughly two players per major nation — Egypt, France, Peru, England, the United States and Malaysia all have more Olympic-calibre players than that. Several players are already exploring nationality switches ahead of the qualifying window. The World Squash Federation and PSA are rewriting qualification criteria in real time.

The medal picture is Egypt vs the world. Mostafa Asal currently sits at men's World #1. On the women's side, Nour El Sherbini just clinched her eighth World Championship — tying Nicol David's all-time record — and is targeting Olympic gold to close the gap. Diego Elías, the first South American ever to reach squash's world number one ranking in April 2023, is Peru's genuine medal threat and the most compelling outsider story in the sport.

Where this lands: the 16-player draw is a short-term insult the Olympic Gateway Effect will outlive. Broadcast hours, not draw size, drive participation booms. Egypt's government already funds squash at a level the rest of the world can't match; an Olympic gold will multiply that advantage. Watch for France, the United States, and Peru to double their national-programme budgets inside 12 months of the closing ceremony.

Cricket and Baseball/Softball: The American Market Play

128 years. That's how long cricket has been away from the Olympics — a gap longer than the average country has held an NOC. Baseball left Tokyo 2020 and wasn't scheduled for Paris. Both return for the same commercial reason: the United States is already the fastest-growing cricket market and the largest baseball market on earth. LA 2028 is, above all, a television product for the American household, and these two debutantes are pure market play.

The cricket tournament uses the Twenty20 format, with six men's and six women's teams of 15 players each. Total quota: 180 athletes. Matches run at a temporary stadium built inside Fairplex in Pomona — a 500-acre site about 50 kilometres east of the Olympic Village. First ball is expected on July 12, 2028, two days before the opening ceremony, which makes cricket technically the earliest Olympic sport on the schedule.

Qualification is the controversial piece. The ICC is expected to approve a continental qualification model: the highest-ranked eligible team from each of its major regions (Asia, Africa, Americas, Europe, East Asia-Pacific) qualifies automatically, with a final spot decided through a global qualifier. Host USA qualifies automatically. That model freezes out several T20-strong nations — if England ranks above Ireland and the Netherlands but is eligible only via a "Team GB" entry, the men's European qualifier becomes a political exercise more than a cricketing one.

Team USA enters with structural advantages the rest of the world won't match before 2028. Major League Cricket — the franchise T20 league that debuted in 2023 — will run its fourth season between June 18 and July 18, 2026, across six teams (Los Angeles Knight Riders, MI New York, San Francisco Unicorns, Seattle Orcas, Texas Super Kings, Washington Freedom). Every one of those rosters seeds the USA Olympic squad. MI New York are the reigning MLC champions.

Baseball occupies Dodger Stadium from July 15–20. Six men's teams. Softball moves to the Devon Park complex in Oklahoma City from July 23–29 — the only LA28 sport played fully outside Greater Los Angeles, a compromise that tells you how seriously USA Softball negotiated with the organising committee. The United States, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela qualified through the 2026 World Baseball Classic. Two more teams join via the 2027 WBSC Premier12.

MLB player participation is the remaining wild card. Commissioner Rob Manfred has repeatedly expressed optimism — he told reporters at the 2025 All-Star Game that "it is possible to take it and play the All-Star Game in its normal spot and have a single break that would be longer obviously." Translation: an 11-day All-Star break, scheduling gymnastics, and a new CBA clause. The MLB Players Association hasn't finalised terms. A lockout or labour dispute in late 2027 could erase big-league participation entirely.

The Five-Sport Pattern: What LA 2028 Is Actually Building

Put the five sports on one sheet and a clear pattern emerges. Four of the five have a dominant incumbent — Egypt in squash, the United States and Canada in lacrosse, the NFL talent pipeline in flag football, the USA's MLC-fed programme in cricket. Only baseball has genuinely distributed medal contenders. The IOC didn't pick these sports to expand competitive variety. It picked them to expand audience.

That shows up in the quota math. The 698 extra spots arrived without a corresponding cut to any established sport — a significant political win that would've been impossible under Agenda 2020's original zero-growth framework. Olympic programming is moving from equal-distribution competition to market-fit content, and LA28 is the cleanest version of that thesis the Games have ever staged.

The Rugby Sevens precedent is the most useful historical parallel I can offer. Rugby sevens was voted in at the 121st IOC Session in Copenhagen by 81-8 — a near-unanimous signal the Olympic movement wanted new audiences, not new competitive depth. In the five years following inclusion, World Rugby's digital platforms recorded 22 million video views during the Games themselves, up 77% from the prior cycle. Emerging-nation interest scored 54% post-Rio. Fiji won gold twice and went from a tier-2 rugby nation to a permanent broadcast fixture. The same economic transformation — compressed, amplified, and televised to a bigger American audience — is the bet LA28 is placing on all five debuts.

My specific prediction: by the closing ceremony, flag football's domestic TV ratings will exceed 4.5 million average-minute audience for the men's and women's gold-medal games, cricket will break 10 million viewers across the Indian diaspora in the United States for the India-Pakistan group match (assuming both qualify), and squash will set the Olympic sport with the highest year-over-year Google search growth in the six months after the Games. The Gateway Effect doesn't discriminate by sport size — it simply amplifies whatever audience the sport had before it walked into the Coliseum.

Sources and Reporting

• IOC Press Release — official 141st Session approval of five additional sports
• LA28 Official Games Plan — venue assignments, event programme
• Wikipedia — 2028 Summer Olympics — consolidated schedule + athlete quota data
• NFL.com — official 32-0 owners vote and resolution terms
• World Lacrosse Q&A — sixes format specification and qualification framework
• World Squash — reaction and timeline on the draw reduction
• ESPNcricinfo — ICC continental qualification model
• White House joint statement — Biden-Trudeau Haudenosaunee advocacy
• World Rugby — Rugby sevens Olympic Gateway Effect data

The Verdict: The Olympic Gateway Effect

LA 2028 isn't a five-sport expansion — it's a five-sport launchpad. Flag football has the most capital behind it, squash has the steepest political fight, lacrosse has the most unresolved cultural tension, cricket has the biggest audience ceiling, and baseball has the most uncertain player pool. Every one of them walks in with a dominant favourite, which means the first medal tables will feel predictable. The Gateway Effect doesn't live in the medals — it lives in the five years after the closing ceremony, when participation, sponsorship, and federation funding curves bend permanently upward. Three of these five will still be on the Olympic programme in 2040. The other two will have paid the IOC back, in audience dollars, long before then.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many new sports are at the LA 2028 Olympics?

Five optional sports were added for LA28: flag football (Olympic debut), squash (Olympic debut), cricket (first appearance since 1900), lacrosse (first medal appearance since 1908), and baseball/softball (first return since Tokyo 2020). Together they add 698 athlete quota spots to the Games, pushing the total athlete count to 11,198 across 36 sports and 351 medal events.

Will NFL stars actually play flag football at LA 2028?

They can — but the cap is one player per NFL team, plus each club's designated international player. The NFL owners voted 32-0 in favour of participation at the May 2025 Spring League Meeting, with injury protection and salary-cap credits written into the resolution. Justin Jefferson, Tyreek Hill, and Joe Burrow have publicly expressed interest; Patrick Mahomes's availability depends on his current knee rehabilitation timeline.

Why was the squash draw reduced to 16 players?

The IOC's Olympic Programme Commission cut the originally-promised 32-player draw per gender to 16 in 2025 as part of a cost-effectiveness and athlete-quota review. Squash is now the smallest sport on the LA28 programme with 32 total athletes, down from an originally promised 64. Nations are already exploring nationality switches to ensure top players qualify under the reduced quota.

Can the Haudenosaunee play lacrosse at LA 2028 under their own flag?

Not under current IOC rules. Despite a joint Biden-Trudeau statement on January 17, 2025 asking the IOC to make an exception, the Olympic Charter restricts team entries to recognised National Olympic Committees. Haudenosaunee players holding US or Canadian passports may represent those countries, but the Iroquois Nationals can't enter as a team under current IOC policy.

Where will LA 2028 cricket be played?

Cricket matches will take place at a temporary stadium being built inside the Fairplex complex in Pomona, California — a 500-acre venue about 50 kilometres east of the Olympic Village. The site has hosted the Los Angeles County Fair since 1922. Cricket is scheduled to start on July 12, 2028, two days before the official opening ceremony, making it the earliest Olympic sport on the competition calendar.