Study estimates reductions in NFL attendance due to player protests, indicating reactions among fans.
On September 1, 2016, Colin Kaepernick first took a knee during the San Francisco 49ers' final preseason game. The protest quickly became league‐wide, and inspired similar actions by players in the WNBA, NWSL, NBA, college football and other professional sports. The National Football League (NFL) player protests ended in 2018 following an agreement between league owners and the Players Association on a new anthem policy. This study estimated the effect of players' anthem protests on NFL game‐day attendance. We specify a demand function using measures of contest quality from betting markets and estimate a two‐way fixed‐effects model to account for unobserved time‐invariant heterogeneity. The results indicate that player anthem protests are associated with statistically significant reductions in game‐day attendance, consistent with boycott behavior among some fans. These reductions were partially offset by attendance from MAGA‐aligned fans engaging in in‐person counter‐protest behavior and BLM‐aligned fans attending games to support player protests.
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Harmon et al. (2026) studied this question.
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