Are There Economic Benefits for the Green Bay Packers to Remain a Publicly Owned Team?

Are there economic benefits for the Green Bay Packers to remain a publically owned team?

The Green Bay Packers is the only NFL team that has stock holders. In fact, they are only one of four American professional sport teams to be publically owned. What does this mean? Are there any great advantages for a professional sports team to be publically owned? If there are, why aren’t more American sport teams publically owned? Does this mean that the disadvantages far outweigh any benefits? This is an interesting topic for us as we are both sport fans, but most importantly, avid Green Bay Packer fans.

First we needed to define what we would constitute as an American professional sports team. Brian Cheffins (1999) assisted us in our endeavor by qualifying the following four leagues as “major league”; Major League Baseball (MLB), the National Hockey League (NHL), the National Basketball League (NBA), and National Football League (NFL) (p. 1). Some might believe that soccer belongs in this group since the sport is widespread throughout the world, but in the United States these are the four that reign supreme. Now that we have a definition of an American professional sports team we needed to further define our scope, which brings us to our following question.

What does it mean for a professional sports team to be publicly owned? Our research has given us much more insight than we once had. To begin with, there are teams that are considered “sports team corporations” and others that are owned by large corporations that are publicly traded (Garrett & Green, 2010). The sports team corporations are those whose revenue and profits are derived from the professional sports team (2010). Whereas, teams that are owned by large publicly traded corporations, the revenue that is generated by the teams is just a small portion of the profits that the corporation realizes (2010). With those definitions in mind, we further defined our topic and concentrated our research on sports team corporations since that is what the Packers, in our opinion, are.

Before beginning the research, we believed that public ownership of American professional sports teams was much more widespread. Of course, we knew about the Green Bay Packers being a publically owned team. What are the other American professional sports teams that are publically owned? There are only three other professional sports teams that are publically owned. MLB has the Cleveland Indians Baseball Co., the NHL has the Vancouver Canucks, the NBA has the Boston Celtics, and of course, the NFL has the Green Bay Packers (Cheffins, 1999). Why is there only four, one from each of the major leagues? It would seem that it would be a far greater number that are publically owned. Obviously, there are advantages and disadvantages for a team to be publicly owned. Our research focused on the advantages and disadvantages of public