Colin Kaepernick said Monday that the politics of NFL team owners, not his playing ability, kept him out of a job after his national anthem protest — a claim he tied directly to the owners’ financial support for President Donald Trump.
The former San Francisco 49ers quarterback made the remarks during an appearance on ABC’s “The View,” according to Breitbart News.
‘I think it was political’
Co-host Ana Navarro asked Kaepernick about the sequence of events that followed his 2016 protest: roughly six months after he began kneeling during the anthem, he said he was forced to opt out of his 49ers contract, and no other team signed him. He later filed a collusion grievance against the league, alleging owners were deliberately keeping him out. The NFL denied that allegation, and the case ended in a confidential settlement.
Navarro asked him what he now believes was the reason “that not a single team would give you a chance to play for them.”
Kaepernick said he sees two forces at work.
“I think it was political,” he said. “I also think it was power.”
He argued that the league’s reaction to his protest says something about where it stands politically — particularly given that he did not protest the NFL itself. “I didn’t protest the NFL, so their response to the protest is very informative in relation to where they stand politically,” he said. “We’ve seen them donate millions of dollars to Trump in this administration.”
Kaepernick points to player leverage
Kaepernick also said the strength of the support his protest generated, including boycotts of the NFL over the league’s handling of it, was part of what he believes drove the response.
He described the league’s demographics as a source of untapped leverage for players. “The NFL being approximately 70% black also means that the players, as the product on the field, have power and control over where the league goes and where they head directionally,” he said.
If players united behind a single demand, he argued, they could halt the sport entirely. “If players spent one weekend and said, we’re not going out there until you address this, there’s no game,” he said.
The comments revive a thread of criticism that has followed the NFL for years: that owners’ politics, and their relationships with Trump, shaped decisions about Kaepernick’s future in the league. Kaepernick has not played in the NFL since the 2016 season.
His collusion case against the league concluded with a settlement that both sides agreed to keep confidential, so the specific evidence behind his allegations has never been aired publicly. The league has consistently denied colluding to keep him unsigned.
During the same interview, Kaepernick referenced the roughly $70 million figure in donations he attributed to NFL owners’ political giving. The claim, made in passing, was not challenged by the hosts on air and is difficult to verify in real time because individual political contributions are reported through federal filings that can lag the calendar.
What is clear is that Kaepernick is no longer framing his absence from the field as a simple question of whether a team needed a quarterback. He describes it as a political decision with a business rationale — that the league’s ownership class made a choice about which way it wanted the institution to lean, and he was on the wrong side of it.
Navarro’s question was pointed precisely because the conventional football answer — that teams evaluated him and moved on — has never satisfied his supporters, and Kaepernick’s answer reinforced that divide.
Whether his claim lands differently now, nearly a decade after he last took an NFL snap, is another matter. The league has since changed some of its policies around the anthem, and Trump’s relationship with the NFL has remained a recurring political flashpoint. Kaepernick, for his part, has spent the intervening years as an activist and businessman rather than a player.
His answer on “The View” suggests he intends to keep connecting those dots as long as the question of why no team signed him is asked — and as long as the ownership group’s political donations remain part of the public record.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2026/09/14/kaepernick-nfl-owners-kept-me-out-over-politics-they-donate-to-trump/