Collective Conscious

The Indypen­dent:

In 1923, the Pack­ers were just another hard­scrab­ble team on the brink of bank­ruptcy. Rather than fold they decided to sell shares to the com­mu­nity, with fans each throw­ing down a cou­ple of dol­lars to keep the team afloat. That hum­ble frozen seed has since blos­somed into a sit­u­a­tion wherein more than a hun­dred thou­sand stock­hold­ers own more than four mil­lion shares of a peren­nial play­off con­tender. Those hold­ing Pack­ers stock are lim­ited to no more than two hun­dred thou­sand shares, keep­ing any indi­vid­ual from gain­ing con­trol over the club. Share­hold­ers receive no div­i­dend check and no free tick­ets to Lam­beau Field. They don’t even get a foam cheese­head. All they get is a piece of paper that says they are part-​​owners of the Green Bay Pack­ers. They don’t even get a green and gold frame for dis­play purposes.

The share­hold­ers elect a board of direc­tors and a seven-​​member exec­u­tive com­mit­tee to stand in at N.F.L. own­ers meet­ings. But foot­ball deci­sions are made by Gen­eral Man­ager Ted Thomp­son, per­haps the luck­i­est and hap­pi­est G.M. in sports. This struc­ture allows Thomp­son to exe­cute deci­sions, even unpop­u­lar ones, with­out an impa­tient, jit­tery bil­lion­aire breath­ing down his neck. Since his hire in Jan­u­ary 2005, Thomp­son has made his share of con­tro­ver­sial moves. But unlike his G.M. brethren around the league, who carry lit­tle or no job secu­rity, Thomp­son has been given the space to see his moves suc­ceed or fail on their own accord. It was Thomp­son who decided to jet­ti­son leg­endary quar­ter­back Brett Favre in 2008 for the unproven but younger and con­sid­er­ably lower main­te­nance Aaron Rodgers. Today, Favre is offi­cially (we hope) retired and Rodgers stands at the pin­na­cle of his sport.

The Pack­ers’ unique setup has cre­ated a rela­tion­ship between team and com­mu­nity unlike any in the N.F.L. Wis­con­sin fans get to enjoy the team with the con­fi­dence that their owner won’t threaten to move to Los Ange­les unless the team gets a new mega-​​dome. Vol­un­teers work con­ces­sions, with sixty per cent of the pro­ceeds going to local char­i­ties. Even the beer is cheaper than at a typ­i­cal N.F.L. sta­dium. Not only has home field been sold out for two decades, but dur­ing snow­storms, the team rou­tinely puts out calls for vol­un­teers to help shovel and is never dis­ap­pointed by the response. It doesn’t mat­ter how beloved the Cow­boys are in Dal­las; if Jerry Jones ever put out a call for free labor, he’d be laughed out of town.

Here are the Pack­ers: finan­cially sol­vent, com­pet­i­tive, and deeply con­nected to the hun­dred thou­sand per­son city of Green Bay. It’s a beau­ti­ful story but it’s one that the N.F.L. and Com­mis­sioner Roger Good­ell take great pains both to hide and make sure no other local­ity repli­cates. It’s actu­ally writ­ten in the N.F.L. bylaws that no team can be a non-​​profit, com­mu­nity owned entity. The late N.F.L. com­mis­sioner Pete Rozelle had it writ­ten into the league’s con­sti­tu­tion in 1960. Arti­cle V, Sec­tion 4—otherwise known as the Green Bay Rule—states that “char­i­ta­ble orga­ni­za­tions and/​or cor­po­ra­tions not orga­nized for profit and not now a mem­ber of the league may not hold mem­ber­ship in the National Foot­ball League.”

I talked with Rick Cher­nick, a mem­ber of the Pack­ers board of direc­tors, about whether other com­mu­ni­ties should chal­lenge the N.F.L. con­sti­tu­tion and be like Green Bay. Cher­nick expressed doubt, saying:

“I’m just not sure in today’s day and age a team could fol­low the Packer way. The cost of own­er­ship is a ton today, thus being almost an impos­si­ble task with­out deep pock­ets. Green Bay is truly a spe­cial, spe­cial situation.”

Cher­nick makes a valid point. But there is a strong coun­ter­ar­gu­ment as well. It may be exor­bi­tantly expen­sive to run a team, but peo­ple don’t buy N.F.L. teams as a civic ser­vice. Being an N.F.L. owner is like hav­ing a license to print money. Tele­vi­sion con­tracts alone run in the bil­lions, with the 2006–2011 con­tracts val­ued at approx­i­mately $3 bil­lion annu­ally, $800 mil­lion more than the pre­vi­ous con­tracts. In addi­tion, N.F.L. teams have received $6 bil­lion in pub­lic funds to build the cur­rent crop of sta­di­ums. In other words, the pub­lic is already shoul­der­ing a great deal of the cost and debt for N.F.L. fran­chises. But these pub­lic dol­lars, through some sort of magic alchemy, morph into pri­vate prof­its that often flow away from the com­mu­ni­ties that ponied up the dough. In the United States, we social­ize the debt of sports and pri­va­tize the prof­its. Green Bay stands as a liv­ing, breath­ing, and, for the own­ers, fright­en­ing exam­ple, that pro sports can aid our cities in tough eco­nomic times, not drain them of scarce pub­lic resources.

Fans in San Diego and Min­nesota, in par­tic­u­lar, where local N.F.L. own­ers are threat­en­ing to uproot the home teams and move them to Los Ange­les, might look toward Green Bay and won­der whether they could do a bet­ter job than the men in the owner’s box. And if N.F.L. own­ers go ahead and lock the play­ers out next sea­son, more than a few long suf­fer­ing fans might look at their long suf­fer­ing fran­chises and ask, “Maybe we don’t need own­ers at all.” It has worked in Green Bay—all the way to the Super Bowl.