The Green Bay Packers, one of the NFL's best teams of the 1960s, and increasingly of the 1990s, are owned by their fans. Football champions in 1929, 1930, and 1931, Super Bowl I, II, and XXX champions, the Packers were incorporated in 1923 as a private, non-profit, tax-exempt organization. Article I of their bylaws states, "this association shall be a community project, intended to promote community welfare...its purposes shall be exclusively charitable." The team can move only through dissolution, in which case the shareholders get only the $25 a share they put in. A board of directors, elected by the stockholders, manages the team.

This non-profit status has been threatened only once, in 1949. The Packers needed to raise more than $100,000 to avoid insolvency. Co-founder Curly Lambeau, coach since 1919, member of the board of directors, and current stadium namesake, found four men willing to invest $50,000 each if the team would become a profit-making venture. The board refused, instead choosing to authorize 10,000 shares of common stock at $25 a piece, 4,628 of which were issued. To insure that not one individual or company had too much control, the maximum number of shares per shareholder was set at 200. Instead of four owners, the team now had over 4,000. Lambeau resigned.

The loyalty of these fans and owners is legendary. Games at Lambeau Field have been sold out for over thirty consecutive seasons. Streets are literally deserted for three hours on autumn Sunday afternoons. The waiting list for season tickets is 36,000 names long, for seats in a stadium that holds 60,000. It is common for season tickets to be willed from one generation to the next and to be hotly contested in divorce proceedings.

The bond between team and city that has been fostered through nearly fifty years of community ownership is also unique in professional sports. During training camp tradition dictates that all players -including 300 pound lineman-ride local children's bikes to practice. Through this process players often foster friendships with individual kids throughout the preseason.

Green Bay's metropolitan area is home to fewer than 200,000 people, yet the Packers rank in the top 20% of all professional teams in terms of franchise value. As player salaries have continued to escalate, however, the shareholders in late 1997 decided that more revenue needed to be raised for the team to remain competitive into the future. The 10,000 shares issued in 1950 were split into 10 million shares, 400,000 of which were made available to the public at $200 a piece.

Before the league would approve the sale, however, Commissioner Tagliabue insisted that the $80 million generated go to stadium improvements or toward a new facility; but not toward player salaries. Economically, this insistence means basically nothing, as this new money will simply free up other revenue to be used on players. But it's significant because with the NFL's revenue sharing plan, stadiums, and specifically luxury suites, are the reason for the disparity in income among teams. By insisting that Green Bay's stock revenue be put into a stadium, the league is adding further fuel to the franchise free agency fire that has swept across the league since the Raiders moved from Oakland to Los Angeles in 1984. Unless a city is fortunate enough to have a generous owner with a sense of loyalty to the community, fans and citizens will either be forced to pay up themselves for a new stadium, often unwillingly, or watch their teams leave.

Public ownership, on the other hand, allows for stadium funding to come from those in the community who want to support the team. Furthermore, in cities where the team is a permanent, rooted civic asset, fans and citizens are much more willing to financially support their team. If the fans receive a commitment, they will return loyalty with loyalty, as the fans in Green Bay have overwhelmingly shown.

More:

• Green Bay Packers Home Page has a section with Team History

Other Resources:

• Roots, Roots, Roots for the Home Team: Community-Owned Professional Sports by Daniel Kraker and David Morris. ILSR.
• Don't Bribe 'Em. Buy 'Em: A strategic proposal on how New Yorkers can create--and control--a minor baseball league of their own - by Daniel Kraker and David Morris. ILSR.
  Executive Summary
• Rooting the Home Team: Why the Packers Won't Leave--and Why the Browns Did - by David Morris and Daniel Kraker, from The American Prospect magazine, September-October 1998. ILSR.
• City Baseball Magic - designing baseball parks as if community matters.