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NEW YORK — The NFL is taking another swing at elevating its long-struggling Pro Bowl Games, moving the event to a new date and locale.
The league will stage the 2026 Pro Bowl Games, its version of an all-star game, on Tuesday, Feb. 3 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event will be held indoors during Super Bowl week, and on a custom-built field at the site of the league’s Super Bowl Experience, the primary fan-facing event during the week. Super Bowl LX will be held five days later at Levi’s Stadium.
The primary competition will remain a flag-football game featuring teams of top players from the American and National Football Conferences. That component continues to promote flag football, a vital league initiative ahead of the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where it will debut as a medal sport and will likely feature NFL players.
The new venue and timing, developed after consultation with players, are designed to inject further life into the event and also allow more star players to be a part of Super Bowl week.
“This uses our biggest stage to showcase this game in a very big way,” said NFL EVP Peter O’Reilly at the league’s fall meeting. “We’re building what you might call a Thunderdome for flag [football].”
The upcoming event at the Moscone Center will be ticketed and open to fans, but a final capacity has not been finalized. ESPN will again air it, and the Manning brothers remain actively involved but will not coach the two squads.
The 2025 Pro Bowl Games averaged 4.7 million viewers, down 18% and the third straight annual decline. Given the NFL’s dominance over not only the rest of sports but all of U.S. television and culture, the continued viewership struggles of the Pro Bowl and then the Pro Bowl Games remain a significant outlier. That television audience in February was less than two-thirds of the comparable 7.2 million average for MLB’s 2025 All-Star Game in July.
