The Green Bay Packers are the one NFL team owned by its fans. Here’s how it works

Only one National Football League team has an ownership structure that resembles a publicly traded company.

The Green Bay Packers, who are the 12th most-valuable NFL franchise at $6.3 billion, according to CNBC’s Official 2024 NFL Team Valuations, are the only publicly owned team across the four major North American professional sports leagues. The franchise is completely owned by stockholders, many of them Packers fans, in a structure established more than 100 years ago.

The Packers have had six stock offerings — which kicked off in 1923, 1935, 1950, 1997, 2011, 2021 — resulting in more than 5.2 million outstanding shares owned by more than 538,000 people, according to the team’s 2024 media guide.

The shares pay no dividend, are nontransferable outside of passing to a child or relative and do not have any intrinsic market value. Shareholders get to attend the team’s annual meeting and vote for a board of directors, but the team says owners do not make any financial gains from ownership. The only way a shareholder receives any money is by selling their stake back to the team, and even that is for a percentage of the original share price.