Only one National Football League team has an ownership structure that resembles a publicly traded company.
The Green Bay Packers, who are the 12th most-valuable NFL franchise at $6.3 billion, according to CNBC’s Official 2024 NFL Team Valuations, are the only publicly owned team across the four major North American professional sports leagues. The franchise is completely owned by stockholders, many of them Packers fans, in a structure established more than 100 years ago.
The Packers have had six stock offerings — which kicked off in 1923, 1935, 1950, 1997, 2011, 2021 — resulting in more than 5.2 million outstanding shares owned by more than 538,000 people, according to the team’s 2024 media guide.
The shares pay no dividend, are nontransferable outside of passing to a child or relative and do not have any intrinsic market value. Shareholders get to attend the team’s annual meeting and vote for a board of directors, but the team says owners do not make any financial gains from ownership. The only way a shareholder receives any money is by selling their stake back to the team, and even that is for a percentage of the original share price.
For 2023, the team took in $638 million in revenue, and its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization were $128 million. The Packers are a nonprofit, and the only member of the team’s seven-person executive committee who gets compensation is the president.
The Packers’ annual revenue goes toward paying players, maintaining Lambeau Field and marketing, among other expenses. The share offerings throughout the years have been used to pull the team out of rocky financial situations and do larger renovations of Lambeau Field.
The unique structure puts the Packers among the teams that newly approved private equity investors will be least interested in. Even deep-pocketed investors cannot use their funds to generate a return.
There is a 200,000 share per person ownership cap — less than 4% of the team’s outstanding shares. Current rules allow approved private equity firms to own up to 10% of a franchise, but even if the Packers wanted a firm to own that much of the team, it is unlikely to entice private equity investors.
Since the stock offerings are so infrequent, the biggest barrier to Packers fans owning a piece of the team is not money — it’s timing.
In the first offering in 1923, one share cost $5. Even though the price has increased throughout the years to as high as $300 for an offering that started in 2021, it is still a tiny fraction of the $6.49 billion average valuation of an NFL team today.
The unique ownership structure is one of several ways the Packers stand as an outlier in the NFL. Green Bay is the smallest television market of any of the 32 teams, and it does not have the high level of tourism that other cities with NFL teams such as Las Vegas, Miami, New York and Los Angeles receive.
It also often draws the ire of other fans and organizations because of its long-term stability at quarterback as the team transitioned from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers to Jordan Love.
The Packers kick off their season Friday against the Philadelphia Eagles led by Love, who recently signed a four-year, $220 million extension with the organization.