NFL owners will meet next week to consider changes to a game manual that says players “should” stand during the national anthem, a guideline that the league has left to the discretion of players who kneeled in larger numbers after criticism from President Donald Trump.

Commissioner Roger Goodell told club executives Tuesday in a memo that the anthem issue is dividing the league from its fans. He said the NFL needs “to move past this controversy.”

NFL spokesman Joe Lockhart said the policy will be “front and center on the agenda” when owners meet in New York next Tuesday and Wednesday.

The movement started by former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick last season had mostly subsided when Trump told a rally in Alabama last month that owners should get rid of players who kneel during the anthem.

In letter to NFL owners, Goodell says, "[W]e believe that everyone should stand for the National Anthem."

h/t @PeterAlexander pic.twitter.com/ALU6ONDuyc

— Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) October 10, 2017

The announcement came hours after Trump suggested the U.S. change its tax laws to punish organizations like the NFL if members are “disrespecting” the national anthem or flag.

Trump tweeted : “Why is the NFL getting massive tax breaks while at the same time disrespecting our Anthem, Flag and Country? Change tax law!”

The NFL gave up its federal tax-exempt status a few years ago and now files tax returns as a taxable entity. So it’s unlikely that Trump’s proposal would change anything.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that Trump was referring to tax breaks relating to stadium funding.

“While the NFL may have given up its tax-exempt status a few years ago, it’s been well documented that billions of dollars continue to subsidize the construction and renovation of professional sports stadiums,” said Sanders. “If this industry is going to use money from American taxpayers to build the very fields they play on, then is it really too much to ask that they show respect for the American flag at the beginning of the game?”

It was pointed out that many of these subsidies come from state and local government, not the federal government. Sanders said that the president isn’t telling local governments what to do, but was simply mentioning a correlation.

Trump also tweeted Tuesday that ESPN ratings have “tanked” because of Jemele Hill, the anchor suspended for making political statements on social media.

While NFL viewership is down slightly, ESPN remains among the most popular cable networks, averaging 3 million viewers in prime time. The network has suffered subscriber losses over the last few years as some viewers have moved to streaming services from cable television.

Hill, an African-American co-host of the 6 p.m. broadcast of “SportsCenter,” received backlash last month after calling Trump a “white supremacist” in a series of tweets that referenced the president’s comments about a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

That comment prompted Trump to demand an apology from ESPN and White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders to call for Hill’s firing.

While ESPN took no formal action against Hill over the Trump comment, she did apologize to the network for the trouble her remarks had caused while standing by the tweets. ESPN cited that apology in announcing Hill’s suspension Monday , saying in a statement that ESPN employees had been “reminded of how individual tweets may reflect negatively on ESPN and that such actions would have consequences.”

Hill targeted Jerry Jones on Twitter on Sunday after the Dallas Cowboys owner stated that players who disrespect the flag would not play for his team. She suggested fans who disagree with Jones should boycott the team’s advertisers and not buy the team’s merchandise.

She clarified Monday that she wasn’t calling for an NFL boycott.

(AP)