PRIOR to this weekend, London has never had the pleasure of hosting the Green Bay Packers as part of the National Football League’s (NFL) international series.

This team, with its unique ownership structure combined with a history of success and its relatively unusual location, is not like the others.

The Packers are the only team in American football’s juggernaut of a league yet to make an appearance at any of its international roadshow games in London or Mexico, where they have so far been held.

This means one of the most successful franchises in NFL history has never experienced a London game, and despite hosting every other team, London will never have encountered one like Green Bay.

The franchise is owned by Green Bay Packers, Inc and is the only publicly owned nonprofit organisation in the league. The nonprofit corporation consists of hundreds of thousands of shareholders who are invested in a community project, not a profit-making one, at the highest level of sport.

The team’s history means it is still able to exist in such a manner thanks to a grandfather clause. Ownership rules put in place since stipulate that a controlling owner in an NFL franchise must hold at least 30 per cent of shares, and there are limits on the number of owners a team can have.

Rules around the 30 per cent minimum have been relaxed recently to allow existing family ownership of clubs to continue, but regardless of any leeway given in other areas, another team being owned publicly by a large community of owners, as Green Bay are, would not be permitted, unless there was some kind of radical shake-up of the entire sporting and political landscape in the country.

“Green Bay Packers Inc has been a publicly owned, nonprofit corporation since August 18, 1923, when original articles of incorporation were filed with Wisconsin’s secretary of state,” The Packers website proudly states.

“One of the more remarkable business stories in American history, the Green Bay Packers [organisation] has been kept viable by its shareholders — its unselfish fans. 

“Even more incredible, the Packers have survived and thrived during the current era, permeated by free agency and the NFL salary cap.”

In the early days of the NFL, there were numerous teams based in smaller towns and cities in the north-east of the United States. These included teams in Toledo, Ohio; Muncie, Indiana; Rock Island, Illinois; Racine, Wisconsin; and Rochester, New York.

Green Bay, Wisconsin, located north of Milwaukee at the bottom of a Lake Michigan bay of the same name, are the only such team — dubbed the “small town teams” — remaining from the league’s formative days.

Teams from bigger cities such as New York, Washington DC, and Chicago also remain from that era, and the Packers will play one of those, the New York Giants, at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday.

The Packers haven’t won a Superbowl since 2010, and the Giants last came in 2011, but these two are still among the most successful teams in the history of the league.

Including pre-Superbowl years (pre-1966), Green Bay are the most successful NFL team with 13 championships, while the New York Giants are third with eight, just behind the Chicago Bears’ nine.

The Packers won the first two Superbowls in 1966 and 1967, and only four teams have won more than their total of four. In the history of the NFL, no team has a better overall win percentage. Not only do the Packers do the sport differently, they often do it better.

Much of this success is down to the way they are owned and run. This is also the reason they are still in Green Bay. The franchise nature of American sports means teams often move to supposedly more lucrative markets, the most recent being the Oakland Raiders who relocated to Las Vegas in 2020.

The Packers are able to continue to exist in the smallest sports market in the United States thanks to their ownership structure. The fact no one owner can have a controlling stake in the organisation means they are likely to remain successfully in Green Bay.

In the unlikely event the shareholders ever decide en masse to sell the team, the money would go to local charities and to communities in Wisconsin.

The articles of association state: “Should there be a dissolution of the Green Bay Packers,  Inc… the undivided profits and assets shall go to the Green Bay Packers Foundation for distribution to community programmes, charitable causes, and such other similar causes to which the Foundation deems appropriate.”

It’s a selfless form of ownership that stands out even more for existing in the big-money world of the NFL. Many conservative commentators and figures within sports are baffled by the idea of people owning shares that do not give them overall control, do not pay dividends, and that they cannot sell or profit from. Maybe they are just annoyed that an outfit owned by the many, rather than the few, can be so successful in an arena they, for the most part, control.

Rare share offerings have been used to fund things like upgrades in facilities in and around the team’s historic stadium, Lambeau Field, named after the team’s founder, Earl L “Curly” Lambeau. 

Early stock issues in 1923, 1935, and 1950 funded the foundation and sound structure of the club, ensuring its solvency and making sure it could remain in Green Bay as a publicly owned not-for-profit organisation.

There are echoes of the type of community ownership occasionally seen in association football, especially at clubs regularly covered on the Morning Star’s sports pages such as Union Berlin and City of Liverpool FC, whose fans own shares that allow them to vote on club matters.

The prevention of one owner or ownership group from controlling the team outright could also be seen as an equivalent to the 50+1 rule in German football which ensures the mass of supporters and members retain the controlling stake.

That something similar exists in a billion-dollar sports league such as the NFL is extraordinary.

In recent years the NFL, as is its wont, has attempted to direct which of its teams are prominent in international markets through the creation of what it calls International Home Marketing Areas.

The United Kingdom marketing rights were given to the Chicago Bears, Jacksonville Jaguars, Miami Dolphins, Minnesota Vikings, New York Jets, and San Francisco 49ers.

This ridiculous premise sums up the aims of these leagues as marketing operations for franchises and owners, more than they are sports leagues for teams and fans.

Green Bay are different, though. Not through any forced attempt to be so, but simply because this type of ownership was the foundation on which the club was built.

It’s a structure that has allowed the Packers not just to exist, but to thrive in a landscape dominated by private enterprise, remaining somewhat shielded from the ills of late capitalism that have permeated sport, and freer to speak out against injustice and inequality as a result.

No sporting ownership model guarantees success, but the Green Bay Packers model at least guarantees important things such as roots in a community and support for as well as from that community.

By choice, the Packers do not yet have an International Home Marketing Area, but their unique existence coupled with some success has made them one of the most popular teams in the league regardless. 

This weekend, for the first time, London is calling for this faraway small town, and UK fans could do a lot worse than adopt Green Bay as their team, regardless of what the NFL says.