Packing Them In

IN recent years, following the well-documented travails of clubs such as Dundee, Motherwell, Dunfermline Athletic, Hearts, Rangers, Kilmarnock and so on, there has been much talk around Scottish football concerning fans buy-outs and ownership of clubs; of making the local football club an essential part of the community.

There have been a couple of sugestions of a community buy-out of St Mirren, but, to date, nothing.

Well, across the Atlantic, the town of Green Bay, Wisconsin, which is roughly the same size as Paisley, is the home of perhaps the most-successful, community-owned club in all of sport - the Green Bay Packers.

I recently came across an article which describes how the Packers came to be owned by the fans, and what it means. Of course, British and American laws and sporting ethos are not the same, but, this article shows what can be done in the good ol' U S of A, and could surely, one hopes, in somewhat tinkered-with form, be done over here.

The Green Bay Packers are a historical, cultural, and geographical anomaly, a publicly traded corporation in a league that doesn’t allow them, an immensely profitable company whose shareholders are forbidden by the corporate bylaws to receive a penny of that profit, a franchise that has flourished despite being in the smallest market in the NFL—with a population of 102,000.

The Packers have managed not merely to survive but to become the NFL’s dominant organization, named by ESPN in 2011 as the best franchise in all of sports.

The Packers have sold out 295 consecutive home games, and there are 80,000 names on the

waiting list for season tickets. Green Bay residents consider it a point of pride to buy their own bodyweight annually in Packers paraphernalia. The Packers led the NFL in apparel sales last year making $27 million just through the pro shop inside Lambeau Field and the site Packers.com. All that swag, and those endless sellouts, made the Packers the 11th-highest-revenue team in the NFL in 2011, with total income of over $280 million, despite the fact that it plays in by far the smallest of the league’s 32 cities. (Ironically, this success means that Green Bay pays into the NFL reserve fund set up to redistribute revenue from larger market teams to smaller market teams.)

When you talk to Packer management, you start to realize that success is a tribute to the careful, constant maintenance of two things: the product on the field and the community’s warm feelings about that product. The team has a special place in this community. It is owned by this community.

The Packers must constantly walk that fine line between profitability and community. Every other NFL franchise is controlled or entirely owned by one majority shareholder, and NFL rules prohibit otherwise. (The Packers’ ownership structure predates current NFL rules.) Ticket prices, concessions, parking, stadium naming rights—all of that is dictated at most NFL stadiums by whatever the owner feels the market will bear, and every additional dollar is profit into the owner’s pockets.

The Packers don’t operate like that. Take ticket prices: Even after a 9 percent bump this Super Bowl championship year, the highest-priced ticket is $83, lower than all but two other franchises.

“We work as hard as anyone to increase revenue, to decrease costs. But we also judge our success by how we are regarded in the community,” says Jason Wied, the team’s vice-president of administration and general counsel. “We could probably double home game revenue if we charged New England Patriot prices, but we have to think of our blue-collar base.”

Wied is typical of those near the top of the Packer organization. As a child growing up in Green Bay, he was one of the kids who brought his bike to practice every day in the hopes a player would ride it back to the locker room, a quirky local tradition that cements the bond between community and team. He stayed in Wisconsin for college and law school before coming to work for the Pack. “Our job,” says Wied, “is to sustain this organization into the next generation. To make sure the Packers stay in Green Bay. From time to time we make decisions that may not be in our best interest but are in the best interests of the community.”

More often than not, those interests are the same. Although the Packers were founded in 1919 by local high school football star Curly Lambeau, it was the team’s articles of incorporation from 1923, based on a now-defunct Wisconsin non-profit tax status, that instituted the basic structure. It includes a provision that if the team were sold or moved, the proceeds should go to a local American Legion post. (That was changed in 1997 so the beneficiary would be the Green Bay Packers Foundation, a charitable trust.) Subsequent stock offerings in 1950 and 1997 reauthorized the ownership principles, which would make any modern-day CEO giddy at the operational freedom.

The 112,158 Green Bay Packers Inc. shareholders are entitled to no profits or dividends and cannot sell, assign, or transfer a share to a third party. In other words, Packers shares are permanently worthless. “If you’re a Green Bay person, well, you just see this as a way of supporting the team,” says Bea Froelich, 72, who owns two shares, one of which is framed on her stairwell.

Owning a share entitles you to show up once a year to approve a slate of directors. Prospective candidates for the board are invited by existing board members, with the nods usually given to prominent local businessmen and community notables. “It’s such an honor when they ask you to join the board,” says Peter M. Platten III, a former vice-president of the Packers and CEO of Valley Bancorporation. “We all grew up here with this team, so when they ask, you feel like you’ve been recognized.”

The board in turn elects the executive committee, which makes the important business decisions about running the organization. The biggest is who should be CEO of the Packers—the role that for every other franchise is played by its owner.

Nothing like the Packers can happen again. The NFL’s ownership rules forbid the model of public shareholders; the NFL’s goal is to ensure that clubs have a single owner with financial resources and management accountability.

Ultimately, the Packers are able to thrive in ways others cannot because the team is a cultural icon—a symbol of America’s love of the underdog who over performs. The intensity of feeling at Lambeau every home game is common to only a handful of other pro sports venues in the country—Fenway Park before a playoff game might come closest. There is the game on the field, and then there is the sense of those 60,000 in attendance that they are involved in something bigger than the sport; they’re honouring a compact.

As he paces the sidelines before the kickoff, Chief Executive Officer Mark Murphy is mindful of that heritage, that special bond between team and town that he is charged with carrying forward. “We’re stewards,” he says, looking up from the playing field to the fans filing into Lambeau. “We’re taking care of the Packers for the next generation.”

TODAY, Green Bay - tomorrow: Paisley, or Kilmarnock, or even Govan - why not?