Football season is a time fans look forward to all year.
Nevertheless, with the NFL seemingly encouraging players — or at the very least giving a pass to players who protest the national anthem, that trend may be diminishing. Many fans have expressed their frustration with the league by turning off their televisions and choosing not to attend games.
Last week was the first week of the league games, and one of the first things people noticed was empty seats in the stadiums.

On Twitter, Sportswriter Ian Rapoport noted that the empty seats did not go unnoticed.
“NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart on the attendance in LA & SF: ‘Any time we empty seats that something we want to address.’ Focused on sellouts,” he tweeted.

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Sellouts may be happening less and less as the league becomes mired in politics, and fans get fed up with it.
This is how the stadium looked in Los Angeles during the Rams game:

And this is how the San Francisco 49ers game looked during the second half:

Empty seats in stadiums indicate a serious problem for the NFL. When stadium bleachers have gaping holes where fans should be sitting, it looks especially bad. It indicates that fans do not care enough to pay for a ticket and watch their favorite teams play.
Empty seats also hit the multi-million dollar franchise where it hurts — the pocketbook.
Sports Illustrated reported that in the past year, more players with the NFL have protested the anthem. In the third week of the preseason games, players in at least six games exhibited some form of protest during the anthem.
One of the unintended consequences of NFL players protesting the anthem could be the destruction of their own league, and the league’s encouragement of this kind of behavior does’ help the situation. In fact, it angers patriotic fans who simply want to watch a game and not be bothered by political and anti-American statements.
The NFL is privately owned, and it is certainly free to do as it chooses, but it is not free from the consequences of those choices.
From the looks of these sparse crowds, it is already paying the price.
H/T Red Flag News
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