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Rob Demovsky, ESPN Staff Writer
GREEN BAY, Wis. — There is nobody more powerful in the Green Bay Packers‘ organization than the team president. Yet when Bob Harlan held that post for 19 years and oversaw the franchise’s return to glory in the 1990s, he never masqueraded as Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft or any other wealthy NFL owner.
And he made sure no one who worked at 1265 Lombardi Ave. did either.
“I always told the people on our staff: ‘Every time somebody calls this organization, remember they own the team, we don’t,'” Harlan recalled recently.
And there are 538,967 of them who might pick up the phone at any time and dial 920-569-7500.
Whether it’s Harlan from 1989 to 2008, Mark Murphy since January 28, 2008, or the recently named Ed Policy, who will take over in July 2025 after Murphy reaches the team president’s mandatory retirement age of 70, none of them will ever own the Packers — even though the president essentially acts as the owner when it comes to voting on NFL policies.
In the simplest of terms, this is how the team in the smallest city in American professional sports operates as the only one without a controlling owner.
The Packers’ articles of incorporation prohibit any single person from owning more than 200,000 shares — protection against someone attempting to control the team.
According to the Packers, there are some 5,204,625 shares of the team owned by the half-million-plus stockholders. The stock pays no dividends and cannot be traded, therefore it has no market value, though it can be transferred to a family member.
“There really is no model for this other than this,” said Rick Chernick, a Green Bay business owner who served on the Packers’ board of directors from 1998 to 2022. “It’s not like the board dictates anything day-to-day; they really don’t. The employees who report to Mark and to the executive team, they’re the ones who do the lion’s share of the work. We’re just like a sounding board and will listen to what’s going on and make suggestions and give ideas.
“But it is absolutely fascinating when you travel and you say you’re on the Packers’ board, people say, ‘Who has a board?’ Baseball, basketball, hockey? None of them.”
THOUGH THE SHAREHOLDERS elect the board members, either at the annual meeting held in July at Lambeau Field or by proxy, it’s not exactly an open election. This year, for example, there are two candidates for two seats. In addition, there is only one candidate to replace outgoing executive committee member Susan Finco, who has reached the mandatory retirement age. One of Finco’s last acts was to chair the search committee to pick Murphy’s replacement.
Murphy played a strong role in the appointments, although there is a committee of board members that suggests potential candidates. The board is largely composed of business owners and community leaders, but some have ties to the Packers and/or professional or college athletics.
The current board of 43 directors includes four former Packers players (LeRoy Butler, Johnnie Gray, George Koonce and Dexter McNabb), prominent Wisconsin business owners and even a county circuit court judge. From the board, seven — including the team president — serve on the executive committee.
Past board members include former Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig and former University of Wisconsin athletic director Pat Richter.
Board members receive no financial compensation. However, the members of the executive committee typically travel to road games with the team and sit in the visiting owners box.
“It’s a different kind of board in the sense that it’s really a community board, it’s made up of people from our state,” said Richter, who served on the board from 1996 to 2011. “Everybody has a passion for the Packers, and I think that’s where it starts.
“Just because people have bought teams or bought into teams, the success of a team really depends on the type of people you have running the team. They’ve been very fortunate to bring good people in there, trustworthy people. The board is really like a check-and-balance system so to speak, which is good. If you said all these professional teams were publicly owned, this is the model you’d end up with.”
SINCE THE TEAM was conceived by Curly Lambeau and local newspaperman George Whitney Calhoun in 1919, there have been six stock sales — 1923, 1935, 1950, 1997, 2011 and 2022.
The early sales were necessary just to keep the team in business. The more recent sales were to improve the team’s facilities, including Lambeau Field. In the last sale, about 198,000 shares were sold at $300 each for upgrades at Lambeau Field, including new videoboards and concourse improvements.
None of the money from stock sales can be used to pay players, and all sales need league approval.
It was before the 1997 sale when Harlan, for the only time during his presidency, said he felt like an outsider among the league’s other 31 owners. Harlan wanted to sell shares for $200 each to help support the renovation of Lambeau Field, a $295 million project that was funded in large part by a half-percent sales tax in Brown County. The stock sale, which added 105,989 new shareholders, accounted for just $24 million of that total.
After Harlan’s presentation to a small group of owners and the NFL’s finance committee, he left the room for the group to discuss.
“Apparently, one of the owners told the group, ‘Let’s get those goddamn farmers and their frozen tundra out of this league,'” Harlan said. “Another owner came up to me the next morning and told me what happened. After three trips to the finance committee, I finally did get approval.
‘[Steelers owner] Dan Rooney stood up and said to the group, ‘Green Bay is very important to this league. I think we’ve got to give Bob the full support or we’ll never get this done.’ And we ended up getting a unanimous vote on it. Other than that one time, there was never an issue.”
Murphy, who oversaw two stock sales, never felt any pushback.
“The most recent one, [Cowboys owner] Jerry Jones came up to me and said, ‘I’d like to learn a little more about this, it’s a pretty good deal,'” Murphy said. “Now the league is looking at selling private equity. That’s a way for teams to get cash out.”
Since then, the NFL has held internal discussions about allowing private equity money to be invested into teams. The Packers would not be able to take such money, according to Murphy.
However, the team has a reserve fund that Murphy said last month was valued at $537 million. Murphy, who served as the athletic director at Northwestern and Colgate before he was hired to run the Packers, likened that to a university’s endowment.
“Or it’s the money a deep-pockets owner has,” he said.
“From a football standpoint, every decision we make is: Is this going to help us win?” Murphy added. “We don’t have an owner that’s looking to make a profit or sell. We’re laser-focused on winning.”
If there are downsides from a business standpoint, Murphy doesn’t see any.
“Obviously a lot of our [financial] success is due to the success of the league,” Murphy said. “But most teams are all successful financially.”
THE BOARD AND executive committee weren’t always as hands-off as they are today. Harlan made a significant change after he took over as president in 1989 by distancing the executive committee from football decisions.
Had that not happened, he believes he would have never landed future Pro Football Hall of Fame executive Ron Wolf as general manager in 1991. Wolf had turned down the job four years earlier, in part, according to Harlan, because he did not want to answer to football outsiders on the committee.
In the past, members of the executive committee meddled in football affairs and decisions. Team historian Cliff Christl wrote in 2021 that “[Vince] Lombardi and the three previous coaches who followed Curly Lambeau had all been selected by the executive committee.”
Interference continued after Lombardi’s departure in 1969, although Christl also wrote in 2018 that he “wouldn’t blame the executive committee any more than the coaches or players for how bad things got. At the same time, that’s where I’d start because the committee was 0-for-4 when it came to hiring coaches.”
Harlan’s policy was to hire football people to make football decisions. He hired Wolf in 1991. Wolf hired coach Mike Holmgren in 1992. And the Packers won Super Bowl XXXI after the 1996 season.
“We had to change the way we did business,” Harlan said. “We had to get everybody on the board and everybody on the executive committee to back off. So I went to the executive committee and told them that we have got to get the executive committee and the board of directors to back off from being involved in football decisions. We endured 24 years of bad football [after the Lombardi era], and fortunately they did [agree to back off].”
Murphy continued that practice.
“If it wasn’t for Mark and his leadership and how he runs things, it probably would be difficult and there could be some challenges,” current Packers GM Brian Gutekunst said. “But because of him and the people involved, I think it’s been really smooth.”
THE ONLY MAJOR difference in the structure today is that Murphy, when he hired Gutekunst as general manager in 2018, decided to have both the GM and the head coach report to him. In the past, the coach reported to the GM and the GM to the president.
These days, the only responsibility Gutekunst has to the executive committee is to give a football report at its monthly meetings. Front office sources from other teams have said they envy Gutekunst for not having to answer to an owner.
“I think there probably is [envy],” Gutekunst said. “I think, just, it’s the ability to have the patience we are doing things the right way. But yeah, I think there probably is, and I know there’s a lot of pride in our organization in how we go about things in that fact as well.”
There’s reason to think that the executive committee and board of directors will remain hands-off when Policy becomes the 11th president in team history a year from now. Policy, whose father, Carmen, served as president of both the 49ers and Browns, has been with the Packers since 2012 and has a full understanding of how the organization functions.
“The whole story of this team is almost like fiction to me,” Harlan said. “The way it started, the way people stepped forward constantly to save the franchise every time it was in trouble by passing the hat and having stock sales, I think it can work because the people who have the stock do respect the president. It’s a unique situation, but it does work very well, I think.”