September 4, 2026 • 17 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Green Bay, Wisconsin, has a population of just over 100,000 people. It is smaller than many cities with minor-league baseball teams, yet somehow it is home to one of the most famous and valuable franchises in professional sports. Almost every other small industrial town that helped build the early NFL eventually lost its team. So how did the Green Bay Packers survive and turn the city into "Titletown, USA"?
This is the remarkable story of how community ownership, championship football, a new stadium, the rise of Vince Lombardi, and a strategic battle over nearby Milwaukee helped keep the Packers in the NFL's smallest market. We'd like to thank Maapify for helping us share this story.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Coming to you from.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
The city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. If
football's an American religion, Vince Lombardi, the head coach of
the Green Bay Packers from 1959 to 1967, is the
patron saint. And Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin is
football's holiest shrine. Under Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers, the
(00:41):
smallest city with a pro franchise, was renamed Titletown, USA.
This is the story of the NFL team that shouldn't exist.
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
The 60s will be described as a decade in which
football became the number one sport in America. in which
the Packers were the number one team, and Bart Starr
was proudly the number one Packer.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
This is Green Bay. It sits at the southern end
of Green Bay, and it's located in northeastern Wisconsin. With
a population of just over 100,000 residents, Green Bay is
a city that shouldn't be known to many people outside
of Wisconsin. But that's not the case, thanks to the Packers.
Three seconds to go. The Packers trailing by one.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
What?
Speaker 4 (01:38):
Jagger!
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It's been a tradition repeated hundreds of times.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
A celebration that perfectly embodies the shared triumph between team
and fans.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Where every victory.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
The Packers have won!
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Feels like their victory.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Leroy probably started the greatest thing that's ever been started
was jumping in the stands with the fans.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
And then Robert Brooks started doing it.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
And we just built a connection between ourselves and the fans.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
This franchise, within the world's wealthiest sports league, has managed
to put its city on the map.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
To put it in perspective, Green Bay has a smaller
population than most cities with minor league baseball teams. There
are more people on the waiting list for Packers season
tickets than there are residents in Green Bay. And yet somehow,
this tiny paper mill city is home to one of
the NFL's most powerful franchises. On paper, that shouldn't be possible.
Professional football abandoned small towns a century ago to chase
(03:27):
bigger markets. So why didn't the Packers follow the same path?
The Packers' existence goes well beyond being an NFL outlier.
they were a glitch in the league's evolution. A franchise
that shouldn't exist in a place that shouldn't work, surviving
because of a mix of decisions that no modern team
could ever replicate today. This is the story of how
the smallest city in American sports held on to one
(03:49):
of the world's most valuable franchises. You can't tell the
story of the Packers without looking at the league they
were born into. Before the Packers ever existed, professional football
belonged almost entirely to the industrial Midwest. Cities from New
York to Wisconsin were the heart of early pro football,
not because they were big, but because they were built
(04:09):
for it. These were factory towns packed with physically demanding jobs,
the kind of work that produced the sport's true generation
of players. As labour conditions slowly improved in the early 1900s,
workers began having Saturday afternoons free. That created something new.
People suddenly had more free time and disposable income, which
resulted in a hungry audience looking for entertainment. And naturally,
(04:30):
gridiron football became the perfect outlet. Local businessmen recognized that
a strong football team could get their towns together all
while advertising their companies, so they began funding these teams directly.
The Decatur Stalys were literally created by a food manufacturing company,
and the Columbus Panhandles were railroad workers playing under their
employer's banner. This was the world the NFL was born into,
(04:52):
a league built by small industrial cities within the Rust
Belt long before major markets took over. So under this context,
Green Bay's presence didn't seem unusual at all. It was
just another industrial town that had a packing company representing
it on the field. This is how the name Packers
came to be. The franchise joined the NFL in 1921
as its smallest market, but it didn't take long before
(05:13):
towns in similar positions started vanishing from the league. The
early NFL was chaotic to say the least. The same
blue collar towns that formed the backbone of the league
were soon overwhelmed by financial pressure. Throughout the 1920s and 30s,
the NFL steadily shifted its attention toward larger cities, realizing
that tiny industrial markets couldn't support the growing demands of
(05:33):
professional football. And the numbers make the picture clear. More
than 40 teams surfaced across the Rust Belt during the 1920s,
but most were gone within just a few years. There
were several reasons for this collapse. Small towns struggled to
draw enough fans to break even, relying almost entirely on
ticket sales and local sponsorships. Unlike baseball, the country's favorite sport,
(05:55):
The league had no major broadcast money and thus no
national profile. Everything depended on local turnout. And to add
fuel to the fire, the Great Depression of the 1930s
absolutely destroyed disposable income, which bankrupted already fragile clubs. This
forced the NFL to step in and intentionally steer the
league toward larger urban markets. Nothing symbolizes this shift more
(06:16):
than when the Decatur Stalys moved to Chicago and became
what we all know today as the Bears. That move
foreshadowed the NFL's new direction, so you would think that
the Packers were destined for the very same fate, at best.
In almost any scenario, Green Bay should have folded or
moved elsewhere. After all, they were small, broke, and incredibly
isolated with a major city located just a couple hours south.
(06:38):
But they approached their situation from a new angle. This
is how they survived. Within the first few years of
the league's existence, Green Bay was heading toward the conclusion
every other small-town NFL team would eventually face. But instead
of folding or selling to a private owner to relocate,
local leaders organized something unheard of at the time. A
community stock sale. Ordinary residents could buy small shares, not
(07:01):
for profit, but to primarily keep the team alive. And
not only did this strategy work, but it was exercised
on more than one occasion. The Packers needed to lean
on this process again in 1935 after the fallout of
the Great Depression, and once more in 1950. But by then,
the team had six championships to their name. Without those titles,
the community may have been more reluctant to step in.
(07:23):
But with all of that winning, the Packers were seen
as a team worth protecting. And this wouldn't be the
last time a Packers dynasty arrived at the perfect moment.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
When we come back, more of this remarkable story here
on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of
Our American Stories. Send us your story, small or large,
to our email, oas at ouramericanstories.com. That's oas at ouramericanstories.com.
(07:52):
We'd love to hear them and put them on the air.
Our audience loves them, too. And we continue with our
American stories and the story of the Green Bay Packers.
(08:14):
And the first two voices you'll be hearing here are
those of Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Packers,
and his daughter Susan. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 6 (08:25):
I had felt that I had done what I could
for the Giants, really, and I just felt that it
was time for me to move, really, and I made
it a point to try to move. I wasn't going
to be satisfied as an assistant coach, and I wanted
to be a head coach of a professional football team,
and Green Bay gave me the chance to be one.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
All right, the big announcement. We are moving to Green Bay, Wisconsin.
I'm going, where's Wisconsin? So the next day, my father
comes home with a map.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
He said, this is the state of Wisconsin.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
And he's looking. Green Bay. It ain't on the map.
And I'm going, well, I'm not moving any place that's
not on the map. And he said, when I am done,
it will be on that map. And you'll know exactly, Susan,
where you live. The 1960s saw Green Bay climb even higher.
(09:32):
Winning five championships, including two Super Bowls, it was perhaps
the most dominant period of any team in NFL history. However,
even at the height of the Packers' success, a new
threat was beginning to form, and it came from down
the road in Milwaukee. If the Packers were ever going
to move anywhere, it would have been to Milwaukee. The
city was bigger, wealthier, and far more recognizable on the
(09:53):
national stage. for most NFL franchises run by profit-driven owners,
a move like that would have been absolutely inevitable. But
as we know, the Packers weren't a normal franchise, and instead,
they turned Milwaukee into a strategic battleground. For context, the
Packers had included Milwaukee as part of their exclusive home
territory ever since the 1930s. This involved the team playing
(10:15):
several home games there every single season. by keeping a
presence here early on in their history, the franchise essentially
turned Milwaukee into Packers country decades before it would have
happened organically. But it nearly backfired on the franchise, because
in the 1950s, Milwaukee was starting to look like the
better home. Green Bay's old city stadium was small. It
seated barely 25,000 people, and it was so outdated that
(10:38):
players dressed in the nearby high school's locker rooms. As
other NFL teams moved into bigger, modern facilities, league officials
began questioning whether Green Bay could realistically compete as a
primary host city. Meanwhile, Milwaukee County Stadium had just opened
with nearly double the capacity, far better amenities, and a
clear intention to attract major professional teams. From a business standpoint,
(10:59):
Milwaukee looked far more viable and everyone in the league
could see it. That's when pressure started building. The NFL
warned that if Green Bay didn't build a new stadium,
the team might need to shift permanently to Milwaukee. For
a moment, the franchise's future genuinely hung in the balance.
But Green Bay would respond by building New City Stadium,
which would later be renamed to Lambeau Field. The new
(11:21):
venue preserved Green Bay as the team's primary home, even
while they continued playing part of the schedule in Milwaukee.
That secondary market was vital for the Packers, especially without
a deep-pocketed owner behind them. But even going beyond the franchise,
Milwaukee had become too big and too valuable to ignore.
By the 1960s, the American Football League had arrived, It
(11:42):
quickly became a rival league to the NFL, and it
was determined to plant teams in major cities across the country.
One of these targeted cities was Milwaukee. It was one
of the largest markets in the country, it had no
full-time pro football team, and there was a brand new
desirable stadium just sitting there. But the Packers had one
advantage the AFL couldn't get around. They held an exclusive
(12:03):
lease at Milwaukee County Stadium. So Vince Lombardi, the Packers
coach and GM at the time, enforced this immediately, then
extended the deal to keep the Packers games locked into
the city well into the 1970s. That move shut the
AFL out entirely.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Here was Lombardi, you know, this New York City kid,
born and bred, finally goes out to Little Green Bay,
this godforsaken place that he'd only seen once before in
his life. And he made it there and became sort
of a transcendent figure.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Only a few years later, the AFL-NFL merger erased any
chance of Milwaukee getting its own competing franchise. From that
moment forward, Milwaukee was officially sealed inside the Packers' orbit.
It had the population and economic base for an NFL team,
but not the political access or territorial rights to make
it possible. Let that sink in. A small city of
(12:53):
100,000 people was influencing decisions between Milwaukee officials and multi-million
dollar leagues. And the only way this was even possible
was all because of their ownership structure. If you're a
shareholder of the Packers, you don't earn any profit and
you have minimal voting rights. Your shares can't even be
sold publicly. No individual can own a significant portion of
(13:13):
the franchise, which prevents anyone from steering the team toward
drastic moves like relocation. The Packers operate essentially as a
community-run nonprofit. The setup removes the financial incentives that often
push franchises to pursue new stadium deals or flirt with
other markets. As we've seen in the NFL in recent decades,
several cities have learned the hard way when relocation power
(13:35):
rests with a single owner. Those teams moved because one
person decided they could make more money elsewhere. Green Bay, however,
is the exception. With no owner to uproot the franchise
and no mechanism that allows for a sale, the Packers
are anchored in Wisconsin in a way no modern NFL
team can match. And that's never going to change. Fast
(13:55):
forward to today, the Packers no longer resemble the small-town
underdog fighting for survival. Modern NFL economics have simply flipped
the script. Revenue sharing, the foundation of the league's financial model,
distributes national television money evenly across all 32 teams, which
means market size matters far less than it once did.
(14:15):
In an era where the bulk of revenue comes from
national TV deals rather than bums in seats, Green Bay
suddenly stands on relatively equal footing with New York, Los Angeles,
and Chicago.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
Packers are special to these people.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
You know, if.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
They had a 150,000 seat stadium, you couldn't get a
ticket here. There'll be 25,000 people outside the stadium just listening.
They just want to be around it. They don't have
a ticket to get in. And it's an unusual spot.
It always has been.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Today, the Packers' waiting list for season tickets is now
one of the longest in world sports. It stretches decades.
Their brand is international, their games draw huge ratings, and
their value sits among the highest in the world. This
franchise is far more than a success story. The Packers
are the last living link to the NFL's origins. They
survived the chaos of the early NFL. They avoided the
(15:04):
collapse of small town teams, the rise of big cities,
financial crises, and a rival league trying to carve out
their territory. A franchise that should have vanished instead became
one of the sport's defining institutions. And that's what makes
them so appealing to fans outside of Wisconsin. Their historical
significance and classic stadium is the allure to those attracted
by tradition. Their community-owned nature provides a breath of fresh
(15:28):
air to those turned off by the corporate nature of
sports leagues across the world. Under almost any other circumstances,
the Packers wouldn't be here. A publicly-owned team could only
have taken root in an era as unsettled as the
1920s and 30s. But what truly carried Green Bay through, though,
was the way its success arrived exactly when it was needed.
Each dynasty run arrived from the franchise could have slipped away.
(15:50):
Those victories helped unify Green Bay, along with the rest
of Wisconsin, behind the Packers. the team gave its fans
something worth fighting for, and in return, the fans gave
the team a future.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
Anybody who has the idea that just to play or
just to take part, and that's all that's necessary, I
think he's in the wrong business. I think he's in
the wrong country, let me put it that way. I
think one of the things that made America great is
to try to be the best in everything that they do.
And the best, again, is signified by winning.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Their presence today is a reminder that professional football wasn't
built in boardrooms. It was born in factory towns, on
dusty fields, and in places where the sport mattered long
before it paid well. Green Bay still carries that legacy.
They represent a blue-collar past in an ownership model that
modern NFL could never recreate. In a league driven by
corporate ambition and constant relocation, the Packers stand alone yet
(16:48):
continue to thrive because its people never allowed any other outcome.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. And we'd like to thank
Mapify for this story. That's M-A-A-P-I-F-Y. You can find more
stories about sports and geography on Mapify's YouTube channel. And
you can find NFL Stadium map posters and Major League
(17:14):
Baseball ballpark t-shirts at Mapify.com. Again, that's M-A-A-P-I-F-Y dot com.
And what a story you heard about this unlikely city that, well,
rose to the ranks of one of the great national
and international brands in all of sports. And did so
because the community decided during the Great Depression to do
(17:37):
something that had never been done before or since. And
that is, they all bought shares, but yet the type
of shares in which, in essence.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Nothing could change.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
In short, they were a community-run non-profit. The story continues.
of the Green Bay Packers here on Our American Stories.
This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Coming to you from.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
The city where the West begins, Fort Worth, Texas. If
football's an American religion, Vince Lombardi, the head coach of
the Green Bay Packers from 1959 to 1967, is the
patron saint. And Lambeau Field in Green Bay, Wisconsin is
football's holiest shrine. Under Lombardi, the Green Bay Packers, the
(00:41):
smallest city with a pro franchise, was renamed Titletown, USA.
This is the story of the NFL team that shouldn't exist.
Let's take a listen.
Speaker 3 (00:53):
The 60s will be described as a decade in which
football became the number one sport in America. in which
the Packers were the number one team, and Bart Starr
was proudly the number one Packer.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
This is Green Bay. It sits at the southern end
of Green Bay, and it's located in northeastern Wisconsin. With
a population of just over 100,000 residents, Green Bay is
a city that shouldn't be known to many people outside
of Wisconsin. But that's not the case, thanks to the Packers.
Three seconds to go. The Packers trailing by one.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
What?
Speaker 4 (01:38):
Jagger!
Speaker 2 (02:08):
It's been a tradition repeated hundreds of times.
Speaker 5 (02:12):
A celebration that perfectly embodies the shared triumph between team
and fans.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
Where every victory.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
The Packers have won!
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Feels like their victory.
Speaker 4 (02:24):
Leroy probably started the greatest thing that's ever been started
was jumping in the stands with the fans.
Speaker 5 (02:29):
And then Robert Brooks started doing it.
Speaker 2 (02:31):
And we just built a connection between ourselves and the fans.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
This franchise, within the world's wealthiest sports league, has managed
to put its city on the map.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
To put it in perspective, Green Bay has a smaller
population than most cities with minor league baseball teams. There
are more people on the waiting list for Packers season
tickets than there are residents in Green Bay. And yet somehow,
this tiny paper mill city is home to one of
the NFL's most powerful franchises. On paper, that shouldn't be possible.
Professional football abandoned small towns a century ago to chase
(03:27):
bigger markets. So why didn't the Packers follow the same path?
The Packers' existence goes well beyond being an NFL outlier.
they were a glitch in the league's evolution. A franchise
that shouldn't exist in a place that shouldn't work, surviving
because of a mix of decisions that no modern team
could ever replicate today. This is the story of how
the smallest city in American sports held on to one
(03:49):
of the world's most valuable franchises. You can't tell the
story of the Packers without looking at the league they
were born into. Before the Packers ever existed, professional football
belonged almost entirely to the industrial Midwest. Cities from New
York to Wisconsin were the heart of early pro football,
not because they were big, but because they were built
(04:09):
for it. These were factory towns packed with physically demanding jobs,
the kind of work that produced the sport's true generation
of players. As labour conditions slowly improved in the early 1900s,
workers began having Saturday afternoons free. That created something new.
People suddenly had more free time and disposable income, which
resulted in a hungry audience looking for entertainment. And naturally,
(04:30):
gridiron football became the perfect outlet. Local businessmen recognized that
a strong football team could get their towns together all
while advertising their companies, so they began funding these teams directly.
The Decatur Stalys were literally created by a food manufacturing company,
and the Columbus Panhandles were railroad workers playing under their
employer's banner. This was the world the NFL was born into,
(04:52):
a league built by small industrial cities within the Rust
Belt long before major markets took over. So under this context,
Green Bay's presence didn't seem unusual at all. It was
just another industrial town that had a packing company representing
it on the field. This is how the name Packers
came to be. The franchise joined the NFL in 1921
as its smallest market, but it didn't take long before
(05:13):
towns in similar positions started vanishing from the league. The
early NFL was chaotic to say the least. The same
blue collar towns that formed the backbone of the league
were soon overwhelmed by financial pressure. Throughout the 1920s and 30s,
the NFL steadily shifted its attention toward larger cities, realizing
that tiny industrial markets couldn't support the growing demands of
(05:33):
professional football. And the numbers make the picture clear. More
than 40 teams surfaced across the Rust Belt during the 1920s,
but most were gone within just a few years. There
were several reasons for this collapse. Small towns struggled to
draw enough fans to break even, relying almost entirely on
ticket sales and local sponsorships. Unlike baseball, the country's favorite sport,
(05:55):
The league had no major broadcast money and thus no
national profile. Everything depended on local turnout. And to add
fuel to the fire, the Great Depression of the 1930s
absolutely destroyed disposable income, which bankrupted already fragile clubs. This
forced the NFL to step in and intentionally steer the
league toward larger urban markets. Nothing symbolizes this shift more
(06:16):
than when the Decatur Stalys moved to Chicago and became
what we all know today as the Bears. That move
foreshadowed the NFL's new direction, so you would think that
the Packers were destined for the very same fate, at best.
In almost any scenario, Green Bay should have folded or
moved elsewhere. After all, they were small, broke, and incredibly
isolated with a major city located just a couple hours south.
(06:38):
But they approached their situation from a new angle. This
is how they survived. Within the first few years of
the league's existence, Green Bay was heading toward the conclusion
every other small-town NFL team would eventually face. But instead
of folding or selling to a private owner to relocate,
local leaders organized something unheard of at the time. A
community stock sale. Ordinary residents could buy small shares, not
(07:01):
for profit, but to primarily keep the team alive. And
not only did this strategy work, but it was exercised
on more than one occasion. The Packers needed to lean
on this process again in 1935 after the fallout of
the Great Depression, and once more in 1950. But by then,
the team had six championships to their name. Without those titles,
the community may have been more reluctant to step in.
(07:23):
But with all of that winning, the Packers were seen
as a team worth protecting. And this wouldn't be the
last time a Packers dynasty arrived at the perfect moment.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
When we come back, more of this remarkable story here
on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of
Our American Stories. Send us your story, small or large,
to our email, oas at ouramericanstories.com. That's oas at ouramericanstories.com.
(07:52):
We'd love to hear them and put them on the air.
Our audience loves them, too. And we continue with our
American stories and the story of the Green Bay Packers.
(08:14):
And the first two voices you'll be hearing here are
those of Vince Lombardi, the legendary coach of the Packers,
and his daughter Susan. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 6 (08:25):
I had felt that I had done what I could
for the Giants, really, and I just felt that it
was time for me to move, really, and I made
it a point to try to move. I wasn't going
to be satisfied as an assistant coach, and I wanted
to be a head coach of a professional football team,
and Green Bay gave me the chance to be one.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
All right, the big announcement. We are moving to Green Bay, Wisconsin.
I'm going, where's Wisconsin? So the next day, my father
comes home with a map.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
He said, this is the state of Wisconsin.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
And he's looking. Green Bay. It ain't on the map.
And I'm going, well, I'm not moving any place that's
not on the map. And he said, when I am done,
it will be on that map. And you'll know exactly, Susan,
where you live. The 1960s saw Green Bay climb even higher.
(09:32):
Winning five championships, including two Super Bowls, it was perhaps
the most dominant period of any team in NFL history. However,
even at the height of the Packers' success, a new
threat was beginning to form, and it came from down
the road in Milwaukee. If the Packers were ever going
to move anywhere, it would have been to Milwaukee. The
city was bigger, wealthier, and far more recognizable on the
(09:53):
national stage. for most NFL franchises run by profit-driven owners,
a move like that would have been absolutely inevitable. But
as we know, the Packers weren't a normal franchise, and instead,
they turned Milwaukee into a strategic battleground. For context, the
Packers had included Milwaukee as part of their exclusive home
territory ever since the 1930s. This involved the team playing
(10:15):
several home games there every single season. by keeping a
presence here early on in their history, the franchise essentially
turned Milwaukee into Packers country decades before it would have
happened organically. But it nearly backfired on the franchise, because
in the 1950s, Milwaukee was starting to look like the
better home. Green Bay's old city stadium was small. It
seated barely 25,000 people, and it was so outdated that
(10:38):
players dressed in the nearby high school's locker rooms. As
other NFL teams moved into bigger, modern facilities, league officials
began questioning whether Green Bay could realistically compete as a
primary host city. Meanwhile, Milwaukee County Stadium had just opened
with nearly double the capacity, far better amenities, and a
clear intention to attract major professional teams. From a business standpoint,
(10:59):
Milwaukee looked far more viable and everyone in the league
could see it. That's when pressure started building. The NFL
warned that if Green Bay didn't build a new stadium,
the team might need to shift permanently to Milwaukee. For
a moment, the franchise's future genuinely hung in the balance.
But Green Bay would respond by building New City Stadium,
which would later be renamed to Lambeau Field. The new
(11:21):
venue preserved Green Bay as the team's primary home, even
while they continued playing part of the schedule in Milwaukee.
That secondary market was vital for the Packers, especially without
a deep-pocketed owner behind them. But even going beyond the franchise,
Milwaukee had become too big and too valuable to ignore.
By the 1960s, the American Football League had arrived, It
(11:42):
quickly became a rival league to the NFL, and it
was determined to plant teams in major cities across the country.
One of these targeted cities was Milwaukee. It was one
of the largest markets in the country, it had no
full-time pro football team, and there was a brand new
desirable stadium just sitting there. But the Packers had one
advantage the AFL couldn't get around. They held an exclusive
(12:03):
lease at Milwaukee County Stadium. So Vince Lombardi, the Packers
coach and GM at the time, enforced this immediately, then
extended the deal to keep the Packers games locked into
the city well into the 1970s. That move shut the
AFL out entirely.
Speaker 4 (12:16):
Here was Lombardi, you know, this New York City kid,
born and bred, finally goes out to Little Green Bay,
this godforsaken place that he'd only seen once before in
his life. And he made it there and became sort
of a transcendent figure.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Only a few years later, the AFL-NFL merger erased any
chance of Milwaukee getting its own competing franchise. From that
moment forward, Milwaukee was officially sealed inside the Packers' orbit.
It had the population and economic base for an NFL team,
but not the political access or territorial rights to make
it possible. Let that sink in. A small city of
(12:53):
100,000 people was influencing decisions between Milwaukee officials and multi-million
dollar leagues. And the only way this was even possible
was all because of their ownership structure. If you're a
shareholder of the Packers, you don't earn any profit and
you have minimal voting rights. Your shares can't even be
sold publicly. No individual can own a significant portion of
(13:13):
the franchise, which prevents anyone from steering the team toward
drastic moves like relocation. The Packers operate essentially as a
community-run nonprofit. The setup removes the financial incentives that often
push franchises to pursue new stadium deals or flirt with
other markets. As we've seen in the NFL in recent decades,
several cities have learned the hard way when relocation power
(13:35):
rests with a single owner. Those teams moved because one
person decided they could make more money elsewhere. Green Bay, however,
is the exception. With no owner to uproot the franchise
and no mechanism that allows for a sale, the Packers
are anchored in Wisconsin in a way no modern NFL
team can match. And that's never going to change. Fast
(13:55):
forward to today, the Packers no longer resemble the small-town
underdog fighting for survival. Modern NFL economics have simply flipped
the script. Revenue sharing, the foundation of the league's financial model,
distributes national television money evenly across all 32 teams, which
means market size matters far less than it once did.
(14:15):
In an era where the bulk of revenue comes from
national TV deals rather than bums in seats, Green Bay
suddenly stands on relatively equal footing with New York, Los Angeles,
and Chicago.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
Packers are special to these people.
Speaker 2 (14:27):
You know, if.
Speaker 5 (14:27):
They had a 150,000 seat stadium, you couldn't get a
ticket here. There'll be 25,000 people outside the stadium just listening.
They just want to be around it. They don't have
a ticket to get in. And it's an unusual spot.
It always has been.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
Today, the Packers' waiting list for season tickets is now
one of the longest in world sports. It stretches decades.
Their brand is international, their games draw huge ratings, and
their value sits among the highest in the world. This
franchise is far more than a success story. The Packers
are the last living link to the NFL's origins. They
survived the chaos of the early NFL. They avoided the
(15:04):
collapse of small town teams, the rise of big cities,
financial crises, and a rival league trying to carve out
their territory. A franchise that should have vanished instead became
one of the sport's defining institutions. And that's what makes
them so appealing to fans outside of Wisconsin. Their historical
significance and classic stadium is the allure to those attracted
by tradition. Their community-owned nature provides a breath of fresh
(15:28):
air to those turned off by the corporate nature of
sports leagues across the world. Under almost any other circumstances,
the Packers wouldn't be here. A publicly-owned team could only
have taken root in an era as unsettled as the
1920s and 30s. But what truly carried Green Bay through, though,
was the way its success arrived exactly when it was needed.
Each dynasty run arrived from the franchise could have slipped away.
(15:50):
Those victories helped unify Green Bay, along with the rest
of Wisconsin, behind the Packers. the team gave its fans
something worth fighting for, and in return, the fans gave
the team a future.
Speaker 6 (16:03):
Anybody who has the idea that just to play or
just to take part, and that's all that's necessary, I
think he's in the wrong business. I think he's in
the wrong country, let me put it that way. I
think one of the things that made America great is
to try to be the best in everything that they do.
And the best, again, is signified by winning.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Their presence today is a reminder that professional football wasn't
built in boardrooms. It was born in factory towns, on
dusty fields, and in places where the sport mattered long
before it paid well. Green Bay still carries that legacy.
They represent a blue-collar past in an ownership model that
modern NFL could never recreate. In a league driven by
corporate ambition and constant relocation, the Packers stand alone yet
(16:48):
continue to thrive because its people never allowed any other outcome.
Speaker 1 (16:54):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Greg Hengler. And we'd like to thank
Mapify for this story. That's M-A-A-P-I-F-Y. You can find more
stories about sports and geography on Mapify's YouTube channel. And
you can find NFL Stadium map posters and Major League
(17:14):
Baseball ballpark t-shirts at Mapify.com. Again, that's M-A-A-P-I-F-Y dot com.
And what a story you heard about this unlikely city that, well,
rose to the ranks of one of the great national
and international brands in all of sports. And did so
because the community decided during the Great Depression to do
(17:37):
something that had never been done before or since. And
that is, they all bought shares, but yet the type
of shares in which, in essence.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
Nothing could change.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
In short, they were a community-run non-profit. The story continues.
of the Green Bay Packers here on Our American Stories.
Host
Lee Habeeb
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