A Proud Day In Green Bay » Brats & Beer

July 20, 2006
posted under: Packers, shareholders

Here’s the sort of thing that makes Packer Nation stand proud. Yesterday more than 20,000 people gathered in Green Bay for the annual shareholders meeting, filling the stands at Lambeau Field to hear reports on the team’s finances and the state of football operations. No other sports franchise in North America can boast such an event because no other team is publicly owned. Granted, most of those 20,000 people hold shares issued in 1997 and don’t have much of a voice in the Packers board room, but they still take a great amount of pride in their ownership, as they should. It is so amazing to me that the Packers have managed to remain a community-owned team all this time in a day and age when every other major sports franchise is owned by some billionaire driven by ego and greed.

At the same time it’s a little sad that Green Bay is the lone franchise that can boast a large and diverse ownership group. If more teams were community-owned we wouldn’t have to contend with the Dan Snyders and the Jerry Joneses trying to buy championships and we wouldn’t have teams abandoning fans that supported them for so long. (Looking at you Indianapolis Colts, Baltimore Ravens, St. Louis Rams, Oakland Raiders, and Tennessee Titans.) And maybe you wouldn’t have teams trying to milk the spigot of public money dry to build new stadiums.

Speaking of, I saw that ol’ Zigi Wilf is still at it trying to get Minnesota to pony up some cash to build the Vikes a new place to play. Since their proposal to build a new facility out in Anoka County was shot down in favor of spending millions to build new stadiums for the Twins and the U of M, it looks now like Zigi might be eyeing up a spot of land near downtown Minneapolis. Why don’t they just rip the roof off the Hubert Dome and add another level of seats and luxury suites? Oh, that’s right, those Vikes fans can’t stand the cold.