Unprecedented Numbers Flock to Back the Pack

On December 6^th, the Green Bay Packers began a sale of 250,000 allocated shares of stock at $250 a piece .The stock provides the owner with no financial benefits; the stock also doesn’t pay dividends or appreciate in value in any way. Within 48 hours, over 185,000 shares had been purchased.

The team announced the fifth stock sale with plans to expand on Lambeau Field, where the Packers play on Sundays. The expansion will cost $143 million to expand and improve the stadium. 7,000 seats will be added, raising the seating capacity to 79,728.

A stock from the 1923 sale. Stocks were sold at $5 a piece.

New scoreboards, a new sound system and new entrances are just some of the other improvements that should be finished for the start of the 2013 season.

This is the fifth time that the Packers have had a sale of stock, and the first since 1998. In 1923, the team was going to go under, so they decided to become a publicly owned team, offering the first sale of stock in order to keep the team in Green Bay.

The Packers, who play in Green Bay, Wisconsin, are the only publicly owned franchise in professional sports. They also hold the distinction for being the smallest city in America to house a professional sports franchise.

Typically, a single person or a small group owns a sports franchise, but such is not the case for the Green Bay Packers. Before this most recent sale, the Packers had 112,148 shareholders owning 4,750,937 shares of stock.

The Packers released this sample of what owners can expect to receive in the mail.

There are also restrictions that the team has put in place to keep one person from owning a surplus of stock, which would allow the person to become the majority owner of the team.

Owners have few perks in owning the team, with invitations to annual shareholders meetings being the highlight. Still, the fans have once again answered the call to help the Packers with their latest renovation. Such a stock sale prevents the team from having to tax the surrounding counties; the team is paying for the rest of the renovations themselves.

The website created for the stock sale had to be overhauled after the amount of traffic on the website caused the entire website to crash. The site, packersowner.com, has been fixed and is now working with much faster speeds.

Calls and messages were left with President and CEO Mark Murphy, board members, and employees in charge of running the stock sale process, but no calls were returned.