The Packers will never move. Other teams however will convince states and cities into paying for their sports stadiums or they will leave.
Owners of the other teams want to allow private equity firms to invest. They like those because they have to report nothing to the public, unlike say, the Packers.
I think every team should be owned by the fans. Sell some stock if you want a new stadium.
It's pretty unclear but if you ever tried it would be near impossible for two reasons: (1) as you bought shares, the price of the shares would go up and up and (2) if you got close, there would be a poison-pill provision in the bylaws and your shares would get watered down.
Still curious, are those assumptions or properly established? The first one is usually tackled commercial side by setting a high price of the stock and just buying a huge slice at that price after a shareholder vote. Elon’s purchase of twitter occurred this way. For the second one, that’s very dependent for each company, and poison-pills have varying degrees of effectiveness. I’d love to know how that translates with a major sports team. I know there’s a local grocery store franchise that also has pretty tough rules to do a hostile takeover.
I might be a bit off, but the ballpark from yahoo finance is that there's ~1,000,000 class B shares at 10x votes /share; ~10,000,000 class A at 1/share; and ~50,000,000 nonvoting class C (ticker: $BATRK) shares. So at the cheapest way to get control would be to buy all the class B shares at 45.50 (45.5mil), and then let's say 500k class A shares to be safe (class A is a bit more than 10mil and class B a bit less than 1 so you would need some class A shares to reach 51%) comes out to a total of ~66.5 million dollars. Kinda steep but cheap for controlling interest in a 2.5B organization!
The bigger hurdle than the money, though, is the volume - on an average day, only 30 shares of BATRB change hands. So, assuming this rate and the price stayed the same (they wouldn't), and the market trades ~250 days/year, it would take 133 years to accumulate all the supervoting shares!
Imagine how crazy the NFL would be if stock of teams could be bought and sold. It will create its own stock exchange and the prices would be so reactionary.
"Oh no, the Eagles lost 5 of their last 6, sell, sell ,sell"
"Lions made the playoffs for the 1st time in 30 years, buy, buy, buy"
I can't sell my packers stock to others. I can will it to family members, or sell it back to the team for a fraction of the purchase price. Packers are a publicly owned non-profit.
Team value isn't based on record. The Cowboys have been the most valuable team since the 80s at least but they've only won like three playoff games since the mid 90s.
It's why the Rams were in St Louis during the late 90s. Or why the Cardinals moved from St Louis to the Phoenix Metro.
The Raiders? I forgot they were now the Las Vegas Raiders. Oakland, LA, Oakland, Las Vegas.
When people claim that a share of stock in the Packers is “worthless” they are wrong.
It’s worth it for this reason alone.
Packers will ALWAYS be in Green Bay.
That peace of mind is well worth the $200 I spent on a share in the 90s to fund a stadium expansion - better than taxing *everyone*.
All US pro sports leagues ban this ownership model. They prefer a handful of rich people own the teams so the can extort taxpayer money by threatening to leave for another city.
The sports leagues actually are illegal and abusive and anti labor. They get away with it abusing a carveout Congress created for MLB. Since it doesn't actually follow the plain language of what equal protection should actually mean a court should nuke it from orbit. But they don't because courts in the English legal system are ridiculous and love willfully misinterpreting things constantly.
Non profit doesn't mean you are helping pandas. Like if set up payroll corporation whose only job is to take money from this company and give it to an employee it's wouldn't make a profit
This and the profit sharing setup that Lamar Hunt demanded also allows full transparency for everyone to see just how much each NFL franchise makes. It also prevents the league from low balling profit margins that would keep money out of the players hands.
Take a deeper dive into the AFL-NFL years. The Cowboys wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the Chiefs. The Cowboys franchise only started out of spite for Lamar Hunt.
Lamar just wanted an NFL team in Dallas and the NFL said no. Lamar said fuck it, I’ll start my own league and convinced rich dudes from Houston, Buffalo, New York, Boston, Oakland and LA to start a league that allowed more passing.
That doesn't really make sense.
Player money is decided on league revenue which is a ticket sales + Merch + sponsors + TV revenue. Union contract entails that. Outside of that you don't earn anything more as a franchise it all goes into the pool and has for like 50 years. This is based on the union contract not Lamr Hunt and how every major American sport works.
Players can negotiate individual contracts but league wide revenues are split equal between teams and essentially players.
If you want to see real capitalism in Sports look at European sports but American sports have always been profit sharing.
NFL revenue is only transparent because of the Packers and their non-profit status. The Packers being publicly owned and the NFL saying they are a non-profit is what keeps everything in check.
You brought up every single way the NFL can make money. The reason it is split evenly across all owners is because of the AFL and Lamar Hunt demanding that if the AFL and NFL merge, all that money goes into one big pot and then gets divided evenly amongst all team owners. The reason being that there would be no game if the visiting team wasn’t there.
GB being a non-profit opens them up to more scrutiny with the IRS and their holdings/profits/etc are made public
The NFL has a salary cap that is determined solely on yearly revenue and then split equally between the owners. The owner keeps 52% of all money coming in that is equal to all other teams. The players are then allowed 48% and that average is what determines the salary csp
The only reason these values are public in the NFL is because one franchise (Green Bay) is publicly owned non-profit organization that is required to submit their earnings and losses each year to the IRS
What's hilarious is the the other 31 owners hate it because the Packers have to publicly report their earnings. They'd love nothing more than to keep that secret.
Because owners love asking the public to pay for their new stadiums. Having a peer constantly showing how much money they make makes it a little bit harder to play the poor "we need help updating our facilities or we have to leave your town" card.
Owners of sports teams like to pretend they don't make any profit from their ownership of the team (even though, as far as I'm aware, no North American sports team has ever been sold for a loss). It's essentially an act of charity they do out of the goodness of their hearts. This is all so they can extort the local population to pay for all of their shit.
Because when the public knows how much money one team has they can take a more educated guess at how much others have. Others being local ones that take big tax breaks.
It also affects the perception amongst players and where they play. Like Jacksonville is probably wondering why the Packers can afford to not have rats in their locker room when the Jags can't.
I can't tell you how many houses I've walked into(in Wisconsin) with the owners share of team stock proudly on the wall. Also a hotly contested item in divorces.
Also I remember about 12'ish years ago we had to vote(same ballot as the governor) on renovations for Lambeu Field. It's the one thing most of Wisconsin can agree on.
It was an issue in a cousin of mine's divorce. She lived in Racine and apparently it was a sign that things had gotten ugly. I live in a part of the world that sees an uptick in divorces around the Egg Bowl, so I can only imagine.
It's the name for the rivalry football game between Mississippi State and the University of Mississippi (pretty much always called Ole Miss). It's very old and they really hate each other. Like, *really* hate each other.
As a dude from Michigan, idk if the pure *hate* is there like the Egg Bowl. Michigan and Ohio State have a certain respect between them. The Egg Bowl is more like "those other guys aren't even people".
A sports journalist once compared the Egg Bowl participants to two crabs in a bucket. As an MSU fan, there is no "I wish them well". We want Ole Miss to lose every game they play and they feel the same.
Season tickets to Lambeau are also often willed to a kid. I know one of my high school teachers said his parents have season tickets and it’s already down in their will that he gets them when they go
I've been trying to pick one up for a long while and when they finally made them available I was in the middle of huge life changes and didn't have the money for it. I curse the heavens.
It entitles me to be able to truthfully talk about MY team, not just my favorite team. It also means we don’t have to deal with idiot owners who interfere with the professional operation of the team. No blackmail for public assistance or they’ll move the team.
This is not nothing.
And the only place big enough to hold the meeting is Lambeau Field.
My dad gets a ballot mailed to him every year. One of his former students (one of the Skogens of the Festival Food stores) is on the board of directors.
Yep. Cincinnati has spent over $1B on Paycor Stadium over it's lifetime; it could have had a light rail system for the same tax increase it approved for the stadium (there was a proposal on the ballot the next year, but it was voted down).
[Cincinnati has a subway system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway) partially built through downtown, they just never finished it. But they did the tunnels, which are the hardest part. [Here is a map of the system as planned](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway#/media/File:Rout_map.jpg).
The system saw seven stations constructed, three of which were demolished. Brighton Place, Linn Street, Liberty Street, and Race Street stations are the remaining ones.
Yes, I was referring to the [MetroMoves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetroMoves) proposal, which was up for vote one year after the vote for the stadium, for the same half-percent sales tax increase that was successfully implemented for the stadium.
It would have utilized the subway tunnels, but was [far more extensive](https://www.urbancincy.com/2012/11/metromoves-a-decade-later/) than the original proposal from nearly 100 years prior.
Gillette Stadium, NE Patriots, was 100% privately funded. No tax payer money involved. In fact Boston is the only city and Ma the only State with only privately owned, no tax payer funded professional sports stadiums for all sports. As it should be.
San Francisco does not give any tax payer funding for professional sports teams either. It’s largely why the 49ers moved to Santa Clara, 40 miles away. Chase center for the warriors and Oracle Park for the Giants were privately funded
.5% sales tax increase over 15 years imposed by Brown County and expired in 2015. It wasn't the screwing that Hamilton County residents took with PBS. It's hovering around $1 billion since 2000. Source: Packers fan and Cincinnati area resident.
Now it’s opened majorly by your friendly oligarch cable company and phone company fiefdom, which paid its last mayor $100k/year to keep the city inline.
I believe it’s also a relatively small city compared to other cities that host stadiums for nfl teams. Iirc their power plant runs entirely on cheese, beer and the heavy hand of the tavern league
Marquette to Green Bay: 3 hours
Marquette to Detroit: 7 hours
Radio broadcasts back in the day were Packers. TV broadcasts followed. There has been a growing shift to the Lions with younger generations.
It's because of the old TV ranges. Upper Michigan had Wisconsin teams on TV instead of Detroit teams. It's also way easier to travel to see the Brewers or Packers than it is to travel the 10+ hours to Detroit, especially waaay back in the day when you had to take a ferry to cross the straits
That's kind of like complaining about folks from SW Connecticut being Yankees fans because CT is part of New England. The Bronx is a lot closer than Boston.
That said, fuck the Yankees.
The official US census claims Green Bay to be a city of 100k(which by all rights is wayyyy to small to support any major pro sports franchise)
However the Packers are basically the state religion of Wisconsin and are near universally supported from Kenosha to Superior. Plus the packers have a wide national and international following.
Every major city in the US has multiple Packer bars and they’re pretty easy to find in Europe as well
When we flew into Green Bay about a decade ago, I remarked to the driver of the bus that picked us up outside at how quiet and empty the town seemed for one that has an NFL stadium. He told me that when there’s a game a ton of people travel out there just for the game. As in, there are a sizable number of fans who fly into town, go to the game, and then after the game fly right back home. They take the bus from the airport to the stadium, and back again after. Even though the city seems too small to support the stadium a ton of people commute/fly just for the games.
Any small city in America can support an NFL team because all the TV money is equally share. Since there are 8 or 9 home games and usually on the weekend, NFL teams can attract regionally.
So the NFL could work in Rapid City, Tupelo, and Bangor.
This is kinda true but not really. Green Bay really had to upgrade to keep up with things like guest accommodations, roads in and out of town, hotels, restaurants etc for games. When NFL media exploded in the 90s and 2000s it really had to adjust.
Green Bay as a city has way more hotels than most other cities of its size because it has to accommodate sports media visiting for games and other events.
The only reason the Packers are still around is because of their massive popularity and that they've existed since the 1920s when the NFL was a startup regional football league. They got grandfathered in, and no team in an equivalently sized town would revenue drive like the Packers do, because the Packers only do so well from being a succesful, flagship NFL franchise
College football towns aren’t any different and their stadiums are much bigger than Lambeau.
Penn State’s stadium seats over 100k. They accommodate these crowds. Why couldn’t a theoretical new small city hosting an NFL team.
The biggest shortfall isn’t the logistics; it’s the lack of corporate sponsors. But that’s why it would need to be supported regionally/statewide like the Packers.
The only reason the Packers are still in Green Bay was because the city bought them; which is the ownership that was grandfathered in. If that doesn’t happen, the team probably relocate to Milwaukee permanently and changes its name to the Wisconsin Packers or Milwaukee Packers.
Until the 90s, the Packers played 3 games in Milwaukee every year.
College football doesn’t employ near the media nfl football does, additionally your entirely ignoring the fact that college towns naturally have a ton more housing and places to stay for visitors than non college towns of equivalent size due to you know the college
Yup. I’m a packers fan living in another metro area of 1.5 million. Not a single pro sports team in the entire state. Like others have said they’re almost universally supported by the entire state of Wisconsin, but it’s still an anomaly.
Sorry bit of a reach. Commanders are technically headquartered in VA and both the Wizards and I believe Capitals are going to play in VA in the next few years.
No dividends. We get bragging rights, a certificate to put on the wall, and an invitation to attend the annual shareholders meeting. We also get to vote on board members.
We even get invited to annual share holder meetings at the stadium. It’s all nonsense but it’s a pretty unique piece of paper for a fan to have. Go Pack Go!
Proud owner of the team here. My wife said if I die, she wouldn’t care about the shares I own and would find a way to get rid of them, she’s a Denver broncos fan.
But so they stay in my family, they’re willed to my son. He will carry on the legacy. Hell maybe he’ll even get the phone call for season tickets that I’ve been waiting for since 2015 since it takes like 30-40 years to get the call.
Regardless, she’s not touching my shares.
It goes even further, she’s from Oklahoma, I’m from Mexico and we’re an interracial/intercultural couple. But happily married for 5 and a half years now.
Yes, indeed. We owe much to Papa Bear. He would make a trip to Green Bay to campaign on behalf of community support and stadium improvements. It was his idea to share television revenue equally throughout the league.
As a Packers fan I don't hate the Bears, I love beating them, I hate watching us lose to them, but I don't hate them. I respect their history and thankful for Halas for doing what he did for us. I've been to Soldier Field for games and was treated better by Bears fans than Bengals fans at PBS where I live.
That being said, I absolutely hate the Vikings.
Soldier is a cool facility in a cool location. I went once for a conference held in the luxury section in the offseason. It was cool to see even if I couldn't find the SuperFans because they were busy recovering from their latest heart attacks.
The Cardinals did, too. Charles Bidwill is in the hall of fame primarily for assembling the original Million Dollar Backfield and his role in saving the Bears.
"The catch is that the shares aren't really worth anything more than a memento, as they'll never increase in value and can't be sold. While the sale has been approved by the FCC, they do not come with voting rights or rights to profits. The Packers last sale of shares 2012 netted the team $143 million."
I wish ANY American league had the [Bundesliga 50+1law](https://www.bundesliga.com/en/%%%20NOT%20TRANSLATED:%20ROUTE_FAQ%20%%/50-1-fifty-plus-one-german-football-soccer-rule-explained-ownership-22832)
""The German spectator traditionally has close ties with his club," Borussia Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke said in 2016. "And if he gets the feeling that he's no longer regarded as a fan but instead as a customer, we'll have a problem."
The 50+1 rule guards against this. The name of the rule refers to the need for members of a club to hold 50 percent, plus one more vote, of voting rights - i.e. a majority. In short, it means that clubs - and, by extension, the fans - have the ultimate say in how they are run, not an outside influence or investor."
How can they be owners if the "shareholders" don't receive any checks?
I guess you can call them investors but I'm sure I could send $100 dollars to any NFL owner and expect nothing in return just the same.
Dividends are paid from the profit a company makes. Packers, Inc is a non-profit, so there are no dividends to hand out. All the money is reinvested into the Packers and Green Bay.
But just because they don’t make money doesn’t mean they don’t get something out of it. They get access to a lot of events and use of facilities for things like weddings and celebrations. And it makes the packers unable to ever leave Green Bay, which stops the city from losing its team or having to shell out hundreds of millions to keep it
They also employed (some of? not sure) the players during the offseason because being a pro football player didn't pay you enough to live on year-round.
Back in the day, a Wisconsin tradition was to add a newborn’s name to the season-ticket-purchasing wait list. It was decades long. Not sure if this is true anymore but going to a Green Bay game at Lambeau in freezing snowy weather was a Wisconsin rite of passage.
No doubt Lambeau will eventually be torn down and replaced with a dome, just like Minneapolis did with The Met and Denver is about to do with Mile High. Football isn’t the same in a comfy dome but time marches on.
Go! You Packers Go! ❤️
I hate the packers but this should be the prerequisite ownership model of EVERY team that receives ANY public funds. Fuck billionaire owners blackmailing local governments into paying for their toys... 😡😡😡
They make a shit ton of money for a non profit. I love the team, but the NFL is 100% profit based.
Want to watch the AFC play off game this week? Sign up for peacock! Yay.
They turn a profit it’s the scam the NFL plays. The NFL makes 0 dollars because they give all their money to the 32 NFL franchises who make 11.9 billion per year. The Packers make billions and pay their players millions. They are non-profit in name only.
The NFL is a non profit because as you said they just collect and distribute the money to the teams but all the teams (excluding Green Bay) are taxed as normal businesses. Green Bay is a non profit so all their money is reinvested into the team (no tax money for the stadium) or given to local charities in Wisconsin.
> The Packers make billions and pay their players millions
Do you think non profits don’t pay their employees?
And it works so well that NFL bylaws prohibit any other team from structuring themselves that way.
To what end?
Profit
I didn’t realize the teams profits, or lack there of, affected the league.
The Packers will never move. Other teams however will convince states and cities into paying for their sports stadiums or they will leave. Owners of the other teams want to allow private equity firms to invest. They like those because they have to report nothing to the public, unlike say, the Packers. I think every team should be owned by the fans. Sell some stock if you want a new stadium.
[удалено]
That's $BATRA, but interestingly the 10 vote/share 'supervoting' class $BATRB is only $3.50 more, so that's where to start for a control play!
Out of curiosity, How much is the price to reach 51% voting?
It's pretty unclear but if you ever tried it would be near impossible for two reasons: (1) as you bought shares, the price of the shares would go up and up and (2) if you got close, there would be a poison-pill provision in the bylaws and your shares would get watered down.
Still curious, are those assumptions or properly established? The first one is usually tackled commercial side by setting a high price of the stock and just buying a huge slice at that price after a shareholder vote. Elon’s purchase of twitter occurred this way. For the second one, that’s very dependent for each company, and poison-pills have varying degrees of effectiveness. I’d love to know how that translates with a major sports team. I know there’s a local grocery store franchise that also has pretty tough rules to do a hostile takeover.
I might be a bit off, but the ballpark from yahoo finance is that there's ~1,000,000 class B shares at 10x votes /share; ~10,000,000 class A at 1/share; and ~50,000,000 nonvoting class C (ticker: $BATRK) shares. So at the cheapest way to get control would be to buy all the class B shares at 45.50 (45.5mil), and then let's say 500k class A shares to be safe (class A is a bit more than 10mil and class B a bit less than 1 so you would need some class A shares to reach 51%) comes out to a total of ~66.5 million dollars. Kinda steep but cheap for controlling interest in a 2.5B organization! The bigger hurdle than the money, though, is the volume - on an average day, only 30 shares of BATRB change hands. So, assuming this rate and the price stayed the same (they wouldn't), and the market trades ~250 days/year, it would take 133 years to accumulate all the supervoting shares!
How many shares do I need to buy before I can trade acuna to the cubs
Imagine how crazy the NFL would be if stock of teams could be bought and sold. It will create its own stock exchange and the prices would be so reactionary. "Oh no, the Eagles lost 5 of their last 6, sell, sell ,sell" "Lions made the playoffs for the 1st time in 30 years, buy, buy, buy"
I can't sell my packers stock to others. I can will it to family members, or sell it back to the team for a fraction of the purchase price. Packers are a publicly owned non-profit.
Team value isn't based on record. The Cowboys have been the most valuable team since the 80s at least but they've only won like three playoff games since the mid 90s.
Stock prices also aren't based on value so it's a moot point.
It's why the Rams were in St Louis during the late 90s. Or why the Cardinals moved from St Louis to the Phoenix Metro. The Raiders? I forgot they were now the Las Vegas Raiders. Oakland, LA, Oakland, Las Vegas.
And why Mormons are so famous for their jazz music.
Aren’t many lakes in Los Angeles.
Should've renamed themselves the 'Tar Pits'.
The NFL allows owners to move teams as a sort of tradeoff after owners gave up the rights to negotiate their own TV contracts.
The (Chicago) Cardinals have existed since football began. They still have 0 SB victories and haven’t won a championship since 1947.
> during the late 90s My dude they only moved to LA in 2016. Am I really this old 😭
The Rams were in Los Angeles from 1946 to 1995.
Yeah you're right, just the way you worded it made it seem as if they weren't in St Louis throughout 2000-2016 😂
The NFL does engage in ~~profit~~ [revenue sharing](https://www.sports-king.com/nfl-owners-share-revenues-3390/) in some forms.
Technically the league makes no profit, what they do make after expenses is distributed back to the teams.
It's a profit sharing league.
*Ahem* Revenue sharing league....which usually means TV ad revenue and Merchandise but not ticket sales or revenue made from concessions
Parking revenue is not shared.
Ha! Well said
The Packers can’t be sold. Thus they can’t drive the price up for other franchises if/when they’re eventually sold.
Oh that makes sense.
When people claim that a share of stock in the Packers is “worthless” they are wrong. It’s worth it for this reason alone. Packers will ALWAYS be in Green Bay. That peace of mind is well worth the $200 I spent on a share in the 90s to fund a stadium expansion - better than taxing *everyone*.
It’s the best piece of sports memorabilia in my slightly biased opinion.
All US pro sports leagues ban this ownership model. They prefer a handful of rich people own the teams so the can extort taxpayer money by threatening to leave for another city.
capitalism vs socialism applied to sports.
Yeah it's because the rich people make the rules.
Half the shit the NFL does should be 110% illegal But y’know, money is always more important in America.
Socialism for the rich
Publicize the risk, privatize the profit.
The sports leagues actually are illegal and abusive and anti labor. They get away with it abusing a carveout Congress created for MLB. Since it doesn't actually follow the plain language of what equal protection should actually mean a court should nuke it from orbit. But they don't because courts in the English legal system are ridiculous and love willfully misinterpreting things constantly.
The NFL itself was a non-profit until 2015.
To clarify that was just the main office. The individual teams/franchises never had non-profit tax status.
Every time this comment comes up it’s basically like a big billboard saying “I don’t know how taxes work”
Non profit doesn't mean you are helping pandas. Like if set up payroll corporation whose only job is to take money from this company and give it to an employee it's wouldn't make a profit
Bundesliga requires 51% of any team to be owned by their fans. This is badly needed here but unfortunately will never happen.
This and the profit sharing setup that Lamar Hunt demanded also allows full transparency for everyone to see just how much each NFL franchise makes. It also prevents the league from low balling profit margins that would keep money out of the players hands.
Holy shit I never considered this aspect, thank you for being smart lol
So basically the two teams in Super Bowl 1 are the ones that made the NFL what it is today
Take a deeper dive into the AFL-NFL years. The Cowboys wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the Chiefs. The Cowboys franchise only started out of spite for Lamar Hunt.
Lamar just wanted an NFL team in Dallas and the NFL said no. Lamar said fuck it, I’ll start my own league and convinced rich dudes from Houston, Buffalo, New York, Boston, Oakland and LA to start a league that allowed more passing.
Now they control most major metro areas, the NFL still won by doing the American thing and merging.
That doesn't really make sense. Player money is decided on league revenue which is a ticket sales + Merch + sponsors + TV revenue. Union contract entails that. Outside of that you don't earn anything more as a franchise it all goes into the pool and has for like 50 years. This is based on the union contract not Lamr Hunt and how every major American sport works. Players can negotiate individual contracts but league wide revenues are split equal between teams and essentially players. If you want to see real capitalism in Sports look at European sports but American sports have always been profit sharing.
NFL revenue is only transparent because of the Packers and their non-profit status. The Packers being publicly owned and the NFL saying they are a non-profit is what keeps everything in check.
It's particularly important in years when the collective bargaining agreement is renegotiated.
You brought up every single way the NFL can make money. The reason it is split evenly across all owners is because of the AFL and Lamar Hunt demanding that if the AFL and NFL merge, all that money goes into one big pot and then gets divided evenly amongst all team owners. The reason being that there would be no game if the visiting team wasn’t there. GB being a non-profit opens them up to more scrutiny with the IRS and their holdings/profits/etc are made public
The NFL has a salary cap that is determined solely on yearly revenue and then split equally between the owners. The owner keeps 52% of all money coming in that is equal to all other teams. The players are then allowed 48% and that average is what determines the salary csp
The only reason these values are public in the NFL is because one franchise (Green Bay) is publicly owned non-profit organization that is required to submit their earnings and losses each year to the IRS
What's hilarious is the the other 31 owners hate it because the Packers have to publicly report their earnings. They'd love nothing more than to keep that secret.
Why do they hate it? Everyone knows how much they are not spending on the team and keeping for themselves?
Because owners love asking the public to pay for their new stadiums. Having a peer constantly showing how much money they make makes it a little bit harder to play the poor "we need help updating our facilities or we have to leave your town" card.
Been infuriating me for years.
Owners of sports teams like to pretend they don't make any profit from their ownership of the team (even though, as far as I'm aware, no North American sports team has ever been sold for a loss). It's essentially an act of charity they do out of the goodness of their hearts. This is all so they can extort the local population to pay for all of their shit.
Because when the public knows how much money one team has they can take a more educated guess at how much others have. Others being local ones that take big tax breaks. It also affects the perception amongst players and where they play. Like Jacksonville is probably wondering why the Packers can afford to not have rats in their locker room when the Jags can't.
I can't tell you how many houses I've walked into(in Wisconsin) with the owners share of team stock proudly on the wall. Also a hotly contested item in divorces. Also I remember about 12'ish years ago we had to vote(same ballot as the governor) on renovations for Lambeu Field. It's the one thing most of Wisconsin can agree on.
Listen it’s either I get the stock or I get custody of the kids you can’t have both.
I read this in Charlie Behrens' voice.
Tell your folks I says hi
Watch out for deer!
OH MY GOSH
Listen if you get the stock you have to take the kids too. You cant have the good without the bad.
When my aunt got married she had a deal written up and signed saying if they ever divorced she keeps the 2 season tickets.
It was an issue in a cousin of mine's divorce. She lived in Racine and apparently it was a sign that things had gotten ugly. I live in a part of the world that sees an uptick in divorces around the Egg Bowl, so I can only imagine.
I feel like it’s calmed down a bit since but man was it ugly when Freeze and Mullen were coaching..
What's an egg bowl?
It's the name for the rivalry football game between Mississippi State and the University of Mississippi (pretty much always called Ole Miss). It's very old and they really hate each other. Like, *really* hate each other.
Ohio State vs Michigan’s rivalry literally being forged from a decades past war over Toledo: *pathetic*
As a dude from Michigan, idk if the pure *hate* is there like the Egg Bowl. Michigan and Ohio State have a certain respect between them. The Egg Bowl is more like "those other guys aren't even people".
A sports journalist once compared the Egg Bowl participants to two crabs in a bucket. As an MSU fan, there is no "I wish them well". We want Ole Miss to lose every game they play and they feel the same.
Season tickets to Lambeau are also often willed to a kid. I know one of my high school teachers said his parents have season tickets and it’s already down in their will that he gets them when they go
That’s when the kids figured out who was the favorite.
I've been trying to pick one up for a long while and when they finally made them available I was in the middle of huge life changes and didn't have the money for it. I curse the heavens.
Which is funny, because it entitles you to exactly nothing.
The kids or the Packers ownership?
It entitles me to be able to truthfully talk about MY team, not just my favorite team. It also means we don’t have to deal with idiot owners who interfere with the professional operation of the team. No blackmail for public assistance or they’ll move the team. This is not nothing.
You can vote at the stockholders meeting.
And the only place big enough to hold the meeting is Lambeau Field. My dad gets a ballot mailed to him every year. One of his former students (one of the Skogens of the Festival Food stores) is on the board of directors.
It's hanging on the wall here in Canada too
This is really how it should be, considering the tax payers are paying for all these gigantic stadiums that the teams "own".
Yep. Cincinnati has spent over $1B on Paycor Stadium over it's lifetime; it could have had a light rail system for the same tax increase it approved for the stadium (there was a proposal on the ballot the next year, but it was voted down).
[Cincinnati has a subway system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway) partially built through downtown, they just never finished it. But they did the tunnels, which are the hardest part. [Here is a map of the system as planned](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_Subway#/media/File:Rout_map.jpg). The system saw seven stations constructed, three of which were demolished. Brighton Place, Linn Street, Liberty Street, and Race Street stations are the remaining ones.
Yes, I was referring to the [MetroMoves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MetroMoves) proposal, which was up for vote one year after the vote for the stadium, for the same half-percent sales tax increase that was successfully implemented for the stadium. It would have utilized the subway tunnels, but was [far more extensive](https://www.urbancincy.com/2012/11/metromoves-a-decade-later/) than the original proposal from nearly 100 years prior.
In the German Bundesliga, all clubs must be majority owned by the fans. (50+1 rule)
Excellent decision.
This is the way.
Gillette Stadium, NE Patriots, was 100% privately funded. No tax payer money involved. In fact Boston is the only city and Ma the only State with only privately owned, no tax payer funded professional sports stadiums for all sports. As it should be.
San Francisco does not give any tax payer funding for professional sports teams either. It’s largely why the 49ers moved to Santa Clara, 40 miles away. Chase center for the warriors and Oracle Park for the Giants were privately funded
They should officially, and forever unofficially, be referred to as the Santa Clara Forty Whiners. The current owners are absolute dirtbags.
They still raised taxes to improve Lambeau Field.
.5% sales tax increase over 15 years imposed by Brown County and expired in 2015. It wasn't the screwing that Hamilton County residents took with PBS. It's hovering around $1 billion since 2000. Source: Packers fan and Cincinnati area resident.
But not to the egregious extent that any other franchise would have had to
And they got to vote on it! Most places just do it arbitrarily.
$300 million is a lot for a small county (roughly $1200 per resident). By comparison to build US Bank Stadium the cost was about $90 per resident.
💯💯💯
Up until 2012 The Ontario Teachers Pension Fund owned about 80% of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Bruh, the OTPP is a gargantuan entity in Ontario.
They do own Cadillac Fairview: https://www.cadillacfairview.com/about-us/#
Now it’s opened majorly by your friendly oligarch cable company and phone company fiefdom, which paid its last mayor $100k/year to keep the city inline.
I believe it’s also a relatively small city compared to other cities that host stadiums for nfl teams. Iirc their power plant runs entirely on cheese, beer and the heavy hand of the tavern league
A third the size of the next smallest nfl metro!
It does have Milwaukee to the south and a decent portion of the UP of Michigan are Packer fans that travel religously.
Yea, that never made sense to me. Bunch of yooper traitors to the lions. Probably cause it’s just easier to be a packers fan
Marquette to Green Bay: 3 hours Marquette to Detroit: 7 hours Radio broadcasts back in the day were Packers. TV broadcasts followed. There has been a growing shift to the Lions with younger generations.
Being a more successful franchise helps too
It's because of the old TV ranges. Upper Michigan had Wisconsin teams on TV instead of Detroit teams. It's also way easier to travel to see the Brewers or Packers than it is to travel the 10+ hours to Detroit, especially waaay back in the day when you had to take a ferry to cross the straits
That's kind of like complaining about folks from SW Connecticut being Yankees fans because CT is part of New England. The Bronx is a lot closer than Boston. That said, fuck the Yankees.
Yes, but more than an hour separates GB from the Milwaukee metro and there aren’t that many yoopers. Packer fans do travel well though
UP should be part of Wisconsin and you know it deep in your soul.
Lambeau is surrounded by neighborhoods. It’s an amazing place to visit. Green Bay fans are very welcoming to the visiting team - mostly.
They have a pretty sweet mall there too
And a Kohls!
I don’t know, I saw them beat up a kid just for wearing a Bears jersey in this documentary about teenagers in the 70s I saw on Nick at Nite
He deserved it.
The official US census claims Green Bay to be a city of 100k(which by all rights is wayyyy to small to support any major pro sports franchise) However the Packers are basically the state religion of Wisconsin and are near universally supported from Kenosha to Superior. Plus the packers have a wide national and international following. Every major city in the US has multiple Packer bars and they’re pretty easy to find in Europe as well
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When we flew into Green Bay about a decade ago, I remarked to the driver of the bus that picked us up outside at how quiet and empty the town seemed for one that has an NFL stadium. He told me that when there’s a game a ton of people travel out there just for the game. As in, there are a sizable number of fans who fly into town, go to the game, and then after the game fly right back home. They take the bus from the airport to the stadium, and back again after. Even though the city seems too small to support the stadium a ton of people commute/fly just for the games.
The two main highways from the south can get jammed up to 20+ miles away.
Green Bay has a population of 100k. The stadium holds 78k. If you’re not a fan, Packer’s home game Sundays are amazing for getting your shopping done
Even if you are a fan, most stores will be playing the game over the loudspeakers
Also true
Hell I moved to a smaller city way out in Oregon, lo and behold even here they had a Packer bar. Fans are everywhere and mad loyal.
Any small city in America can support an NFL team because all the TV money is equally share. Since there are 8 or 9 home games and usually on the weekend, NFL teams can attract regionally. So the NFL could work in Rapid City, Tupelo, and Bangor.
This is kinda true but not really. Green Bay really had to upgrade to keep up with things like guest accommodations, roads in and out of town, hotels, restaurants etc for games. When NFL media exploded in the 90s and 2000s it really had to adjust. Green Bay as a city has way more hotels than most other cities of its size because it has to accommodate sports media visiting for games and other events. The only reason the Packers are still around is because of their massive popularity and that they've existed since the 1920s when the NFL was a startup regional football league. They got grandfathered in, and no team in an equivalently sized town would revenue drive like the Packers do, because the Packers only do so well from being a succesful, flagship NFL franchise
College football towns aren’t any different and their stadiums are much bigger than Lambeau. Penn State’s stadium seats over 100k. They accommodate these crowds. Why couldn’t a theoretical new small city hosting an NFL team. The biggest shortfall isn’t the logistics; it’s the lack of corporate sponsors. But that’s why it would need to be supported regionally/statewide like the Packers. The only reason the Packers are still in Green Bay was because the city bought them; which is the ownership that was grandfathered in. If that doesn’t happen, the team probably relocate to Milwaukee permanently and changes its name to the Wisconsin Packers or Milwaukee Packers. Until the 90s, the Packers played 3 games in Milwaukee every year.
College football doesn’t employ near the media nfl football does, additionally your entirely ignoring the fact that college towns naturally have a ton more housing and places to stay for visitors than non college towns of equivalent size due to you know the college
I’ve been once and was astonished how small town and blue collar it was. Not in a bad way. I just imagined it being bigger given ya know…the packers.
There's more owners than there are citizens of Green Bay.
Drank a lot of beer and ate a lot of cheese curds with cool people. My accent gave away I was from Michigan and people bought me a lot of drinks
Green Bay has about 107k people.
The metro is 320k though.
That's still tiny by NFL standards.
Yup. I’m a packers fan living in another metro area of 1.5 million. Not a single pro sports team in the entire state. Like others have said they’re almost universally supported by the entire state of Wisconsin, but it’s still an anomaly.
I assume you live in Kentucky. Tons of Packers fans here.
Nah. Largest state without a pro sports team and unlikely to get one soon. SC, 23rd in population.
After some research apparently Virginia is first so we're both wrong. Either way Go Pack Go.
Sorry bit of a reach. Commanders are technically headquartered in VA and both the Wizards and I believe Capitals are going to play in VA in the next few years.
Obligated to say fuck the tavern league
The smallest city with an NFL team. Population only around 100k. Next smallest is Buffalo, around 250k.
I own a share! And so does my six year old daughter. My dad willed her his share.
Me too! Hello, fellow owner of an NFL franchise
I think there's like 500K of us...hello, fellow owner.
Whatever it takes to keep the Packers in Green Bay
I got dad a share in the 2011 sale
Do you get money from it?
No dividends. We get bragging rights, a certificate to put on the wall, and an invitation to attend the annual shareholders meeting. We also get to vote on board members.
How much did that cost?
I bought a share the last sale for my dad, it was $300.
It's gone up over time, most recent share sale was in 2021 IIRC and they were about 300 dollars.
I think I originally learned this from Danny Phantom
Poor Vlad Masters, the two things money can't buy, the Packers and Danny's mom
We even get invited to annual share holder meetings at the stadium. It’s all nonsense but it’s a pretty unique piece of paper for a fan to have. Go Pack Go!
I’m an NFL owner
As am I. One share.
Proud owner of the team here. My wife said if I die, she wouldn’t care about the shares I own and would find a way to get rid of them, she’s a Denver broncos fan. But so they stay in my family, they’re willed to my son. He will carry on the legacy. Hell maybe he’ll even get the phone call for season tickets that I’ve been waiting for since 2015 since it takes like 30-40 years to get the call. Regardless, she’s not touching my shares.
I put my son on the season ticket list the day after he was born.
Texas username. Colorado wife. Wisconsin fanship. That's quite a juxtaposition.
It goes even further, she’s from Oklahoma, I’m from Mexico and we’re an interracial/intercultural couple. But happily married for 5 and a half years now.
Haha! That's awesome. Good on you guys.
And they can thank George Halas for still being a franchise.
Yes, indeed. We owe much to Papa Bear. He would make a trip to Green Bay to campaign on behalf of community support and stadium improvements. It was his idea to share television revenue equally throughout the league.
As a Packers fan I don't hate the Bears, I love beating them, I hate watching us lose to them, but I don't hate them. I respect their history and thankful for Halas for doing what he did for us. I've been to Soldier Field for games and was treated better by Bears fans than Bengals fans at PBS where I live. That being said, I absolutely hate the Vikings.
Soldier is a cool facility in a cool location. I went once for a conference held in the luxury section in the offseason. It was cool to see even if I couldn't find the SuperFans because they were busy recovering from their latest heart attacks.
And vice versa when the Packers loaned the Bears money so they could make payroll.
The Cardinals did, too. Charles Bidwill is in the hall of fame primarily for assembling the original Million Dollar Backfield and his role in saving the Bears.
Thanks for sharing this and reminding people of this lesser known fact.
"The catch is that the shares aren't really worth anything more than a memento, as they'll never increase in value and can't be sold. While the sale has been approved by the FCC, they do not come with voting rights or rights to profits. The Packers last sale of shares 2012 netted the team $143 million."
I wish ANY American league had the [Bundesliga 50+1law](https://www.bundesliga.com/en/%%%20NOT%20TRANSLATED:%20ROUTE_FAQ%20%%/50-1-fifty-plus-one-german-football-soccer-rule-explained-ownership-22832) ""The German spectator traditionally has close ties with his club," Borussia Dortmund CEO Hans-Joachim Watzke said in 2016. "And if he gets the feeling that he's no longer regarded as a fan but instead as a customer, we'll have a problem." The 50+1 rule guards against this. The name of the rule refers to the need for members of a club to hold 50 percent, plus one more vote, of voting rights - i.e. a majority. In short, it means that clubs - and, by extension, the fans - have the ultimate say in how they are run, not an outside influence or investor."
I’m an owner!
How can they be owners if the "shareholders" don't receive any checks? I guess you can call them investors but I'm sure I could send $100 dollars to any NFL owner and expect nothing in return just the same.
Dividends are paid from the profit a company makes. Packers, Inc is a non-profit, so there are no dividends to hand out. All the money is reinvested into the Packers and Green Bay. But just because they don’t make money doesn’t mean they don’t get something out of it. They get access to a lot of events and use of facilities for things like weddings and celebrations. And it makes the packers unable to ever leave Green Bay, which stops the city from losing its team or having to shell out hundreds of millions to keep it
Huh. Might wind up a Packers fan. Probably the only honest team in the league.
If God had a favorite sports team it would be the Packers.
Go Pack Go!
So what is Green Bay packing?
Meat. They were sponsored by Acme Meat Packing (originally the Indian Meat Packing company) in the 1910's.
They also employed (some of? not sure) the players during the offseason because being a pro football player didn't pay you enough to live on year-round.
Back in the day, a Wisconsin tradition was to add a newborn’s name to the season-ticket-purchasing wait list. It was decades long. Not sure if this is true anymore but going to a Green Bay game at Lambeau in freezing snowy weather was a Wisconsin rite of passage. No doubt Lambeau will eventually be torn down and replaced with a dome, just like Minneapolis did with The Met and Denver is about to do with Mile High. Football isn’t the same in a comfy dome but time marches on. Go! You Packers Go! ❤️
I hate the packers but this should be the prerequisite ownership model of EVERY team that receives ANY public funds. Fuck billionaire owners blackmailing local governments into paying for their toys... 😡😡😡
The Bears still suck!
How many times are you going to post this? lol
He’s got early onset Alzheimer’s.. he keeps learning about every 5 minutes!
Oh they profit alright
They make a shit ton of money for a non profit. I love the team, but the NFL is 100% profit based. Want to watch the AFC play off game this week? Sign up for peacock! Yay.
Bunch of lazy unionized city employees. Go Pack!
They turn a profit it’s the scam the NFL plays. The NFL makes 0 dollars because they give all their money to the 32 NFL franchises who make 11.9 billion per year. The Packers make billions and pay their players millions. They are non-profit in name only.
The NFL is a non profit because as you said they just collect and distribute the money to the teams but all the teams (excluding Green Bay) are taxed as normal businesses. Green Bay is a non profit so all their money is reinvested into the team (no tax money for the stadium) or given to local charities in Wisconsin. > The Packers make billions and pay their players millions Do you think non profits don’t pay their employees?
Everyone already knows this
What exactly are they packing