Ben Gilbert

Rather than one individual who could just decide to uproot the team and leave them, the ownership of the team lies in this entity that is theoretically a publicly owned entity.

Anytime they want to raise money, they go and sell more shares, more stock in the Green Bay Packers.

And there's hundreds of thousands of people who have bought this stock.

So there's this very distributed ownership group of the Packers.

Not with any expectation of financial return, literally just so they can hold a piece of the Packers.

Or control, because nobody can own more than a certain number of shares.

But this mechanism has kept the Packers in Green Bay, even while capitalist forces and individual whims of billionaires have moved many other teams around.

I have not.

I really want to.

It's wild.

And for a lot of the analysis we'll do later, the data comes from the Green Bay Packers annual report because no other team publishes their P&L, but the Packers do.

Yep.

That comes through shared agreements is $11 billion.

And then there's another six or so that comes from local revenue that teams individually generate.

Yep.

That's per year.

Right.

Just to be clear, that is per year.

It is this flywheel that makes the NFL teams collectively worth something like $140 billion today.

And you could argue that the TV networks were getting a great deal for many, many, many more years.