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Only one National Football League team has an ownership structure that resembles a publicly traded company.
The Green Bay Packers, who are the NFL’s 12th most valuable franchise at $6.3 billion, according to CNBC’s 2024 Official NFL Team Valuations, are the only publicly owned team in all four major North American professional sports leagues. The franchise is owned solely by shareholders, many of them Packers fans, in a structure established more than 100 years ago.
The Packers have had six stock offerings, beginning in 1923, 1935, 1950, 1997, 2011 and 2021, resulting in more than 5.2 million shares outstanding owned by more than 538,000 people, according to the team's 2024 media guide.
The shares do not pay dividends, are not transferable except to a child or relative, and have no intrinsic market value. Shareholders can attend the team's annual meeting and vote to elect the board of directors, but the team claims that owners do not get any financial gain from ownership. The only way a shareholder receives money is by selling their stake to the team, and even that is for a percentage of the original share price.
In 2023, the team earned $638 million in revenue and had earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $128 million. The Packers are a nonprofit organization, and the only member of the team's seven-person executive committee who receives compensation is the president.
The Packers' annual revenue goes toward paying players, maintaining Lambeau Field and marketing, among other expenses. Stock offerings over the years have been used to get the team out of difficult financial situations and make major renovations to Lambeau Field.
This unique structure puts the Packers among the teams that newly approved private equity investors will be least interested in. Even deep-pocketed investors can't use their funds to generate a return.
There is a limit of 200,000 shares per person, which represents less than 4% of the team's outstanding stock. Current rules allow approved private equity firms to own up to 10% of a franchise, but even if the Packers wanted a company to own that much of the team, it is unlikely to appeal to private equity investors.
Since stock offerings are so rare, The biggest obstacle for Packers fans to buy a piece of the team is not money, but time.
In the first offering in 1923, a share cost $5. While the price has risen over the years to $300 in an offering that began in 2021, it is still a tiny fraction of the average $6.49 billion valuation of an NFL team today.
The unique ownership structure is one of the many ways the Packers stand out as an outlier in the NFL. Green Bay is the smallest television market of the 32 teams and doesn't have the high level of tourism that other cities with NFL teams like Las Vegas, Miami, New York and Los Angeles receive.
He also often draws the ire of other fans and organizations due to his long-term stability at the quarterback position, as the team went from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers and then to Jordan Love.
The Packers open their season on Friday against the Philadelphia Eagles led by Love, who recently signed a four-year, $220 million contract extension with the organization.
