Goodell: "I wish we had listened earlier, Kap, to what you were kneeling about and what you were trying to bring attention to"
Tuesday 25 August 2020 15:08, UK
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has admitted he wishes the league had listened to Colin Kaepernick sooner when he began protesting in 2016.
Kaepernick first sat, before going on to kneel, during the American national anthem at the start of NFL games in 2016 in response to social injustice against the black community, including police brutality.
The quarterback left the San Francisco 49ers in 2017 and has not been signed by another team since. In October that year, Kaepernick filed a grievance against the NFL, accusing team owners of colluding to ensure he remained unsigned.
Speaking to former NFL linebacker Emmanuel Acho on his 'Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man' show, Goodell said: "The first thing I'd say is, 'I wish we had listened earlier, Kap, to what you were kneeling about and what you were trying to bring attention to'.
"We had invited him in several times to have the conversation, to have the dialogue. I wish we had the benefit of that. We never did."
In June, the NFL overturned its ban on players kneeling during the national anthem and publicly backed the Black Lives Matter movement.
At the same time, Goodell admitted the league had been wrong to impose its ban, and he told Acho of his frustration at people misrepresenting the message behind the protests.
"It is not about the flag," he explained. "These are not people who are unpatriotic. They're not disloyal. They're not against our military. In fact many of those guys were in the military and they're a military family.
"What they were trying to do is exercise their right to bring attention to something that needs to get fixed. That misrepresentation of who they were and what they were doing was the thing that really gnawed at me."
