Who Owns the Green Bay Packers? Fan Ownership Explained
A nonprofit corporation with more than half a million shareholders owns the Green Bay Packers, the only community-owned team in the NFL. How the stock works.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL History & Records22 min read
- Organized as a nonprofit
- 1923
- Shareholders
- More than 500,000
- Most shares one holder may own
- 200,000
- Executive committee
- 7 members
There is no owner's box at Lambeau Field in the sense that there is one at every other NFL stadium. Nobody bought the Green Bay Packers, nobody inherited them, and nobody can sell them. When the league's 32 owners meet to vote on a rule change or a relocation, the seat at the table for Green Bay is filled by an employee: the club's president, who answers to a board elected by fans.
So the direct answer to who owns the Green Bay Packers is that no individual does. The team belongs to Green Bay Packers, Inc., a publicly held nonprofit corporation organized in Wisconsin in 1923, whose stock is spread across more than half a million shareholders. None of them holds a majority. None can, because the corporation's articles cap any one holder at 200,000 of about 5.2 million shares. The shares pay no dividend and cannot be resold, and the NFL's own ownership rules make Green Bay the only club of its kind in the league, and the only major-league team in the United States owned this way.
A nonprofit corporation with no majority owner
Green Bay Packers, Inc. is a corporation in the ordinary legal sense. It has articles of incorporation, bylaws, shareholders, a board of directors and officers. What makes it unusual is the combination of three features that rarely appear together in professional sport.
It is a nonprofit. The corporation exists to operate a football team, not to return money to investors, and surplus revenue goes back into the club, its stadium and its charitable foundation.
It is widely held. The 1923 founders sold shares to townspeople, and every sale since has been aimed at the general public, so the shareholder base runs from Wisconsin households holding one certificate to fans in every part of the country.
And it is designed so that nobody can take control. The share cap, the restrictions on transfer and the clause governing what happens on a sale all point the same way. A hedge fund cannot accumulate the Packers. A local billionaire cannot buy out the shareholders. The club cannot be moved by an owner who has found a better stadium deal elsewhere, which matters a great deal in a league where that has happened ten times since 1970, as our guide to NFL relocation history sets out.
- 1923Year organized as a nonprofit corporation
- 500000Shareholders, more than
- 200000Most shares any one holder may own
- 7Members of the executive committee
Fixed features of the corporation's articles and governance; the number of shareholders grows with each stock sale and is given here as a floor.
The team is older than the corporation. Curly Lambeau and George Calhoun organized the Packers in 1919, with the Indian Packing Company providing jerseys and the name, and the club entered the league that became the NFL in 1921. It has stayed in the same small city ever since, which makes it one of the oldest franchises still in its original home; our guide to the oldest NFL teams places it among them.
Who, then, is "the owner" for league purposes? The NFL requires each club to designate a person who represents it, votes for it and is accountable to the commissioner. For 31 clubs that is the controlling owner or someone the owner names. For Green Bay it is the president and chief executive, chosen by the board. The president votes the Packers' proxy at league meetings, sits on committees and signs the documents an owner would sign. The difference is that he can be replaced by a board vote rather than a sale.
What a share of Packers stock actually is
A Packers share is easier to describe by what it lacks.
| What a share gives the holder | What a share does not give |
|---|---|
| A stock certificate in the holder's name | Any dividend or share of profit |
| A vote at shareholder meetings | Any rise in value over time |
| Eligibility to attend the annual meeting | Priority for season tickets |
| Recognition as a part-owner of the club | The right to sell it on an open market |
| The ability to leave it to family | A say in football decisions |
The certificate itself is the thing most buyers wanted. It is printed in the style of an old-fashioned stock instrument, and many end up framed on a wall in Wisconsin. The corporation is candid about this in every offering: the documents state that the purchase is not an investment and should not be made in expectation of profit, and the buyer must accept that before the sale goes through.
Transfer and resale
There is no secondary market. A shareholder cannot list a Packers share on an exchange or sell it to a stranger. The bylaws allow transfer only to family members, by gift or by inheritance, and the transfer must be recorded with the corporation. A holder who no longer wants the share can offer it back to the corporation, which may repurchase it at a small fraction of the original purchase price.
Shares have appeared for sale online over the years, and the club treats any such sale as void. The buyer receives nothing the corporation recognizes.
The vote
Each share carries a vote, and the vote is the real substance of ownership. Shareholders elect the board of directors at the annual meeting, and they vote on amendments to the articles and bylaws when the board puts them forward. That is all. They do not vote on the coach, the general manager, the draft, ticket prices or the stadium's beer selection. A shareholder's power is the power to change the board, and in practice slates are put forward by the board itself and approved without contest.
That arrangement is less democratic than the phrase "fan-owned" suggests. It is still a real check. The people running the club know that a large and organized body of shareholders could, in principle, vote them out.
The 200,000-share cap and the clauses that block a takeover
The articles set a ceiling: no person may own more than 200,000 shares. That number looks large until it is placed beside the total. Before 1997 the limit was expressed in older, larger shares; when the corporation split its stock ahead of the 1997 offering, the cap was restated at 200,000 of the new shares. With about 5.2 million shares outstanding, held by roughly 539,000 stockholders after the last offering closed, a single holder at the maximum would own a little under four percent of the corporation.
In practice nobody comes close. Offerings have capped individual purchases far below the ceiling, and most buyers take a single share. The cap exists for the scenario that has never happened: a wealthy fan, or a group acting together, trying to accumulate enough stock to dictate who sits on the board.
Several other provisions back it up.
- Transfer restrictions. Because shares move only within families, nobody can buy up stock from existing holders. The only way to acquire shares is in an offering, at the price and quantity the corporation sets.
- No return on capital. A takeover has no financial upside. Control would bring no dividends and no ability to sell the team for profit, so the usual motive for accumulating stock is absent.
- The dissolution clause. If the corporation were ever sold or wound up, the proceeds would go to charity rather than to shareholders, a provision covered in its own section below.
- League rules. Any change in control of an NFL club needs approval by the other owners. The league has a clear interest in Green Bay staying exactly as it is.
Taken together, these make the Packers close to unsellable. That is the point. The original shareholders in 1923 were not trying to build an asset. They were trying to keep a team in a town that could not support one any other way.
Six stock sales and what each one paid for
The corporation has gone to its supporters for money six times. The first three kept the club alive. The last three paid for Lambeau Field.
| Sale | Circumstances | What the money was for |
|---|---|---|
| 1923 | A struggling club in a town of about 30,000 | Forming the nonprofit corporation and paying debts |
| 1935 | Reorganization after the club went into receivership | Clearing a court judgment and restarting the corporation |
| 1950 | Losses after the war and the departure of Curly Lambeau | Keeping the club solvent and in Green Bay |
| 1997 and 1998 | First sale of the modern era, after a stock split | Renovation and upkeep of Lambeau Field |
| 2011 and 2012 | Second modern sale | The south end zone expansion of Lambeau Field |
| 2021 and 2022 | Third modern sale | Stadium improvements, including new video boards and concourse work |
1923: the Hungry Five
By 1922 the Packers were in debt, rained out of home games and briefly expelled from the league over the use of college players. Andrew Turnbull, the publisher of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, organized a rescue with Lambeau and a handful of local business leaders; the group that steered the club's finances through the following decade is still known in Green Bay as the Hungry Five. In 1923 they formed the Green Bay Football Corporation as a nonprofit and sold about a thousand shares to local residents at $5 each, raising a little over $5,000, with the explicit understanding that there would be no return.
1935: back from receivership
A fan who fell from the wooden bleachers at City Stadium sued the club in the early 1930s. The judgment was modest by later standards, but the club's insurer went out of business before it could be paid, and the Packers could not cover it themselves. A court placed the club in receivership in 1933. In 1935 the corporation was reorganized as Green Bay Packers, Inc., and a new round of stock was sold at $25 a share to raise the money to emerge. The structure that exists today dates from that reorganization.
1950: the postwar sale
After World War II the Packers lost money and Lambeau, who had founded and coached the team for three decades, left in early 1950 after a falling-out with the board. A stock drive that year at $25 a share raised the money the club needed, and the board was enlarged so that more of the city's residents had a voice. It was the last sale for nearly half a century.
The three modern sales were all tied to the stadium. In 1997 the corporation sold shares at $200 each to help pay for Lambeau Field's renovation; in 2011 the price was $250 and the money went toward the south end zone expansion, which added thousands of seats when it opened in 2013; and the 2021 offering, at $300, funded a further round of improvements. Each sale added tens of thousands of new shareholders, many of them outside Wisconsin, and each was marketed openly as a way to own a piece of the team rather than as an investment.
The board, the executive committee and the president
Fan ownership does not mean the fans run the club. Three layers stand between a shareholder and a football decision.
- ShareholdersHold the stock and elect the board of directors at the annual meeting.
- Board of directorsA large board of local volunteers that elects the executive committee and the officers.
- Executive committeeSeven members, including the president, who oversee the corporation between board meetings.
- President and chief executiveA salaried executive who runs the business, represents the club at league meetings and hires the general manager.
- General manager and coachThe football staff, who make the roster, draft and game-day decisions.
A simplified outline of Green Bay Packers, Inc. governance under its articles and bylaws.
The board of directors is large, several dozen members, and drawn mostly from the Green Bay area. Directors serve without pay. The board elects the executive committee, which meets far more often and does the work an ownership group would do elsewhere: approving budgets, overseeing the stadium, signing off on major contracts and choosing the president.
The executive committee has seven members. One of them is the president, who is the club's chief executive and, unlike the others, a full-time paid employee. The other six serve in officer roles or at large and are volunteers.
What the president does
The president is the closest thing Green Bay has to an owner, and the job has a peculiar double nature. Inside the corporation he is an employee who can be removed by the executive committee. Inside the NFL he is the Packers' voice and vote, sitting with billionaires who own their clubs outright. He appoints the general manager, who in turn hires the head coach. When the league negotiates television contracts, a labor agreement or a relocation, the Packers' position is the president's.
The model has a known weakness. Most NFL owners hold the job for decades and can take a long view, and a corporation run by an elected board could, in theory, turn over too quickly or make decisions by committee. In practice the Packers have had relatively few presidents, and the executive committee has given each one considerable freedom. Results on the field have been the best argument for the structure. The Packers have won 13 league championships, more than any other club, a record our guide to Super Bowl wins by team breaks down for the Super Bowl era.
Why no other NFL team can copy the Packers
Fans in other cities ask this every time their team changes hands. The answer is that the league closed the door, and did it deliberately.
The NFL's ownership policy requires every club to have a controlling owner: a single individual, or a family, holding a substantial minimum stake and with final authority over the club. It bars corporations from owning teams except in narrow, structured ways. It bars nonprofit ownership. And it bars the kind of broad public offering through which Green Bay sold its shares.
Green Bay was exempt because it already existed. When the rules were written, the league did not try to unwind a structure that had kept one of its founding franchises alive for decades. It simply grandfathered the Packers in and made sure nobody else could follow.
Why the league wanted it that way
The reasons are partly practical and partly about control. A single accountable owner is easy for the commissioner to discipline, easy to negotiate with and easy to bring into line on league-wide decisions. A club owned by half a million people has interests that are hard to predict. Owners also have a financial stake in keeping franchises scarce and privately tradable, because the value of every club depends on the market for buying them.
There is also a historical reason. Other early NFL teams were, at times, community-backed, and some of those clubs failed. The league's view was that a controlling owner with deep pockets was a better guarantee of stability than a town's goodwill.
Other sports leagues in the United States follow similar rules. In Major League Baseball, the NBA and the NHL, public companies and community groups have owned or partly owned teams at various points, but none of them has a team owned by its fans in the Packers' sense today.
Green Bay's continued success is, in some ways, an embarrassment to the argument. A nonprofit owned by fans in the smallest market in the league has been stable, solvent and competitive for a century. The league's response is that Green Bay is an exception that works because of conditions nobody could recreate. There is something to that. There is also something convenient about it for the 31 owners who benefit from the rule.
The sale clause: from the American Legion to the Packers Foundation
What happens if the Packers are ever sold? Nobody gets rich. That was settled in 1923 and confirmed in 1997.
The original articles said that if the corporation were dissolved or the team sold, whatever was left after debts would go to the local American Legion post, Sullivan-Wallen Post, to build a memorial to soldiers. The point was not the Legion so much as the principle: the founders wanted to make sure nobody involved in the club could profit from its sale, so that nobody would have a reason to sell it.
In 1997, as part of the changes that came with the first modern stock offering, shareholders voted to redirect the proceeds of any sale to the Green Bay Packers Foundation, the club's charitable arm, which distributes money to causes in Wisconsin. The logic is the same. A shareholder who voted to sell the team would receive nothing. The foundation would receive everything.
The effect is to remove the incentive that drives most franchise moves. An owner elsewhere who sells a club or moves it to a richer market captures the gain personally. A Packers shareholder captures none of it. That is the deepest reason the team is still in Green Bay, and it is set out in the corporation's own founding document.
There is a related protection worth mentioning. Because the shareholders cannot gain from a move, and because the board is drawn from the area, the corporation has never had the internal pressure to threaten relocation that other clubs have used in stadium negotiations. When Green Bay needed public money for Lambeau Field, the argument was about keeping the stadium competitive, not about the team leaving.
Why the team is still in Green Bay, and the Milwaukee years
Green Bay is the smallest market in American major-league professional sports, a city of a little over 100,000 people. No other NFL city is close to it in size. If the Packers were a normal franchise, it is hard to imagine them still being there. Two things made it possible.
Shared television money
The first is the NFL's revenue model. Since the early 1960s, national television revenue has been shared equally among all teams, and the league's broadcast contracts became by far the largest source of income for every club. A team in Green Bay receives the same national television share as a team in New York. That evened out the economics of market size in a way no other American league does as thoroughly, and it is the main reason a small-market team can compete. Our explainer on NFL revenue sharing covers how the split works.
The salary cap does similar work on the expense side. Since 1994, every team's player payroll has been bound by a ceiling and a floor, so a bigger market cannot simply outspend a smaller one for players. How that ceiling is set is explained in our guide to how the NFL salary cap works.
The Milwaukee games
The second is that the Packers spent much of the twentieth century as a two-city team. From 1933 to 1994, the club played part of its home schedule in Milwaukee, the state's largest city, to reach a bigger audience and sell more tickets. The Milwaukee games were played at Borchert Field, State Fair Park and Marquette Stadium in the early years, and at Milwaukee County Stadium from 1953.
- 1933First season with home games in Milwaukee
- 1994Last season with home games in Milwaukee
- 62Seasons spanned by the arrangement
- 1957Year Lambeau Field opened as City Stadium
The span runs from the first Milwaukee home game to the last; the number of games played there each season varied.
The Milwaukee games ended after the 1994 season. Lambeau Field had grown, County Stadium was poorly suited to football and the economics of the stadium in Green Bay had improved. Milwaukee ticket holders were offered a package of games at Lambeau, an arrangement that preserved a link with the larger city.
Lambeau itself opened in 1957 as the new City Stadium, built with money from a Green Bay bond referendum, and was renamed in 1965 after Curly Lambeau's death. It has hosted some of the coldest and most remembered games in league history, including the 1967 NFL Championship Game that our guide to the Ice Bowl describes.
The only NFL club that opens its books
Every summer, ahead of the shareholders' meeting, Green Bay Packers, Inc. releases a financial report. No other NFL club does.
The reason is structural. The Packers are a publicly held corporation, and they report to their shareholders. The other 31 clubs are private businesses with no obligation to disclose anything, and their owners have every reason not to.
That makes the Packers' annual report the only regular public window into how the money in professional football moves. Analysts, journalists and players' representatives read it closely, because it shows in outline what an NFL club earns and spends. Two things stand out each year.
National revenue
The first is the size of the national revenue line, which includes the club's share of television contracts and other league-wide income. Because that money is divided equally among the 32 clubs, the Packers' figure is effectively a statement of what every club receives from the league. It is by far the largest item on the income side of the report.
Local revenue and costs
The second is the local revenue line: tickets, the stadium, sponsorships and concessions. This is where market size and stadium quality matter. A club with a new stadium and a large market can earn far more locally than Green Bay can, and the gap between the Packers' local revenue and that of the richest clubs is part of the case Green Bay makes for investment in Lambeau Field.
The report also shows player costs, operating expenses and the corporation's reserve fund. The reserve is significant: Green Bay keeps one because it cannot call on a billionaire owner to cover a shortfall. If a labor dispute shut down a season, or the stadium needed emergency work, the reserve is what the corporation would draw on.
The disclosure has limits. It covers the Packers, not the league, and the figures are aggregated rather than itemized. It does not tell anyone what any other club earns. It remains the most detailed public account of an NFL franchise's finances that exists.
The annual meeting at Lambeau Field
Each summer, usually in July, Green Bay Packers, Inc. holds its annual shareholders' meeting at Lambeau Field. Thousands attend. It looks less like a corporate meeting than a team event, held in the stadium bowl with shareholders in the stands and club officials on a stage.
The formal business is short. Shareholders elect directors to the board, typically confirming a slate the board has put forward. They hear the financial report. Occasionally they vote on amendments to the articles or bylaws. The president gives an account of the year, and the general manager and head coach usually speak about the team.
What shareholders cannot touch
Shareholders do not vote on football decisions, and the meeting is not a forum for them. Questions from the floor are allowed and are sometimes pointed, and the club's officials answer them. The answers are not binding. A shareholder who disagrees with a draft pick or a contract has exactly the same power as any other fan: none.
There is a version of fan ownership in which members vote on everything from the club president to the color of the away jersey. The Packers' version is not that. It is a structure in which shareholders hold ultimate formal control and delegate nearly all of it, with the board as the mechanism of accountability.
The meeting matters for another reason. It is where the community side of the ownership becomes visible. For shareholders, many of whom hold a share passed down from a grandparent or bought as a gift, the meeting is the one day of the year when the certificate on the wall turns into a seat in the stadium and a vote.
Public money behind Lambeau: the 2000 Brown County vote
Fan ownership did not exempt Green Bay from the stadium arms race. By the late 1990s Lambeau Field was old, the league's revenue was shifting toward clubs with modern stadiums, and the corporation argued that without a major renovation the Packers would fall behind financially.
The solution combined the corporation's money, the 1997 stock sale and public money. The public share came from a sales tax. On September 12, 2000, voters in Brown County approved a half-cent sales tax to pay for the county's portion of the renovation. It carried 53 percent to 47, and it was fought over hard in the weeks before the vote.
The renovation, completed in 2003, cost about $295 million. It rebuilt the stadium's concourses, added an atrium and suites and kept the bowl that had stood since 1957. The city of Green Bay owns the building, and a public stadium district created for the renovation holds the lease the club plays under.
The episode is worth noting because it undermines a common assumption about the Packers. Fan ownership did not make them immune to the economics that push other clubs toward public financing. What it changed was the nature of the negotiation. The Packers could not credibly threaten to leave, and they did not. The case was made on keeping the stadium viable rather than on a deadline.
That is still public money. Green Bay's taxpayers paid for part of a stadium owned by a district and operated by a corporation, and the vote was close because plenty of residents objected. Fan ownership and public subsidy coexist in Green Bay, as they do almost everywhere in the NFL.
Fan ownership outside the NFL, and why American leagues refuse it
The Packers' model is rare in the United States and common elsewhere, which is part of why it fascinates fans of other teams.
| Model | Where | How it works |
|---|---|---|
| 50+1 rule | Germany's Bundesliga | Club members must hold a majority of the voting rights in the company that runs the team |
| Member-owned clubs | Spain's La Liga | Real Madrid, Barcelona, Athletic Club and Osasuna are owned by members rather than shareholders |
| Community-owned teams | Canadian Football League | Saskatchewan and Winnipeg are owned by community structures rather than private owners |
| Nonprofit public corporation | NFL | Green Bay Packers, Inc. is owned by shareholders who receive no return |
Germany and Spain
In German soccer, the 50+1 rule requires that a club's members hold at least half of the voting rights plus one in the company that runs its professional team. Outside investors can buy stakes but cannot take control. There are exceptions, notably Bayer Leverkusen and Wolfsburg, clubs founded by companies that kept their ownership, and the rule has been argued over for years.
In Spain, a 1990 law required most professional clubs to become sports companies with shareholders. Four were exempt because their finances were sound: Real Madrid, Barcelona, Athletic Club and Osasuna. They remain owned by their members, who elect the club president.
Canada
Closer to home, the Canadian Football League has had community-owned teams for decades. The Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Winnipeg Blue Bombers are owned by community structures rather than individuals. Edmonton was community-owned from its founding in 1949 until partway through the 2024 season, when a longtime shareholder bought the franchise outright and became its first private owner.
Why American leagues refuse
The NFL, MLB, the NBA and the NHL all require a controlling owner. Their reasoning is the same as the NFL's: a single accountable person, a closed market for franchises and a structure that protects the value of every club. The model also suits the league's view of itself as a business partnership of owners rather than a collection of community institutions.
The Packers stand outside that view, by accident of history and by the persistence of a town that decided in 1923 to keep its team. More guides on the league and the rest of American sport are collected on our United States hub.