It has been almost a decade since Colin Kaepernick last took the gridiron in 2017. Years later, he is back in the spotlight for opening the old book and bringing up things about the league that were left unsaid.
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“I think they only looked at it from the perspective of white fans,” shared the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback on The New Yorker’s Radio Hour. “The part that I think is undercovered is the massive support for the protests and how that continued to grow. And one of the narratives that the NFL continued to try to push out, because it benefited them, saying, ‘Oh, we’re not going to do this,’ because they didn’t want to align with supporting Black communities, was, ‘Oh, you’re bad for business. Like, you’re going to hurt the value of our teams. You’re going to hurt our ticket sales. You’re going to hurt all of these things.’”
Things began intensifying between Kaepernick and the league back on September 1, 2016. Before a preseason contest, he knelt during the national anthem to draw attention to police brutality and racial injustice affecting Black people and other minorities. His decision to protest on the field did not sit well with the league, as, according to the quarterback, the NFL “blackballed” him.
It was a sensitive time politically. In fact, a year later, President Donald Trump sharply escalated the political fight over anthem protests, criticizing kneeling players and calling on fans to boycott NFL games. Ultimately, the NFL did not take any harsh action to officially ban him, but he went unsigned by any team after the 2016 season.
Now, Kaepernick is arguing that the claim that his protest would hurt the NFL’s business was demonstrably false.
“Which got proven to be demonstrably false multiple times. One, because my jersey went to number one as far as a seller,” shared Kaepernick. “Two, in 2018 we did a campaign called Dream Crazy with Nike, and on the back of that Nike stock jumped approximately $6 billion because of the support from people and communities saying, ‘Oh, this is the first time that a company and a corporation has stepped up and supported our communities in this way. We want to make sure that we support that.’”
Back then, Kaepernick remained unsigned, yet the campaign saw massive success. The Nike campaign later won the Grand Prix in Creative Effectiveness at Cannes Lions in 2021. Developed by Wieden+Kennedy, it generated more than $163 million in earned media value; the campaign case study attributed a $6 billion increase in Nike’s brand value to the campaign, as it lifted sales by 31%.
Not just this, Nike released Kaepernick’s signature Air Force 1 ’07 x Colin Kaepernick in December 2019. It was sold out in both adult and children’s sizes within a day.
Kaepernick never got the chance to return to the gridiron again, but he is now returning to his fans through his memoir, The Perilous Fight, which is releasing on September 15, 2026.