A little under 12 months ago Colin Kaepernick, the then quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, decided not to stand during the American national anthem before a pre-season game in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour,” Kaepernick said at the time. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish to look the other way.”

Today Kaepernick finds himself unemployed with the new NFL season a couple of weeks away. This is not a coincidence.

Kaepernick does not belong in the elite group of quarterbacks such as Tom Brady or Aaron Rodgers, yet he was still good enough to start in the 2013 Super Bowl defeat by the Baltimore Ravens and earn a contract worth up to £98 million the following year. Yet now he finds himself a pariah. Team after team have passed him over for back-up roles in favour of vastly inferior talents. Donald Trump, who displayed far more anger at Kaepernick’s posture than he did the death of Heather Heyer at the hands of white nationalists in Charlottesville, predicted as much in May, saying: “They [NFL owners] don’t want to get a nasty tweet from Donald Trump. Do you believe that?”