The aim of the work is to present the method for designing sparse FIR filters with very low group delay and approximately linear-phase in the passband. Significant reduction of the group delay, e.g. several times in relation to the linear phase filter, may cause the occurrence of undesirable overshoot in the magnitude frequency response. The method proposed in this work consists of two stages. In the first stage, FIR filter with low group delay is designed using minimax constrained optimization that provides overshoot elimination. In the second stage, the same process is applied iteratively to reach sparse solution. Design examples demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.