Packers President and CEO Ed Policy has a plan to keep the NFL’s only nonprofit competitive with the rest of a league flush with billionaire owners and private capital. Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
As another offseason of eye-popping player contracts and franchise valuations continues, the chief executive of one of the NFL’s flagship franchises fears being left behind. In an interview, Green Bay Packers President and CEO Ed Policy says the new surge of wealth coming into the league threatens the league’s vaunted economic parity, and with that in mind, Policy says the Packers will take a more aggressive posture on revenue growth.
That will take three primary forms, Policy said: More offseason events at Lambeau Field, more sponsorship sales and ticket price hikes.
As the league’s only nonprofit, the Packers cannot engage in true equity financing (its “public shares” it occasionally sells are little more than souvenirs) and has no billionaire owner who can reach into his or her own pockets to fund the team. The Packers have built a corporate reserve fund exceeding $600 million, Policy said, but that’s less than it appears in the modern NFL financial context.
“If you think about, any other team, they’ve got deep-pocketed owners, most of them are worth significantly more than that, and they could sell less than 10% of their team, give up no controlling interest, and raise a heck of a lot more than that,” Policy said.
Policy, who took over for retiring Mark Murphy last July, says the only answer available to a nonprofit is more revenue, which in turn can cover higher expenses and continue seeding the reserve fund.
“We’re soon to be the only stadium without naming rights,” he said, referring to the expected wind-down of Chicago’s Soldier Field as an NFL venue. “That’s not a threshold we’re looking to cross any time soon, but we might be a little more aggressive with some of the other entitlement inventory we just hadn’t taken advantage of in the past, including things like training facility entitlements and the Titletown campus [the real estate development next to Lambeau Field].”
The Packers increased ticket prices between 3%-11% depending on the section in February, but Policy said the data still shows a significant gap between what the team charges and what the market could bear. “Despite the fact that we are probably a top-three team in terms of demand, we are middle of the pack in terms of price,” Policy said.
He said it’s their goal to stay in the middle, meaning they will not quite go as hard as they could on pricing, but will still keep adjusting as at least seven NFL teams open new or comprehensively renovated stadiums in the next decade, forcing up the average price. “We’ll keep an eye on things, but we may have to be even a little more aggressive in order to remain middle of the pack,” he said.
Many NFL teams look to non-football events like concerts and soccer friendlies to bolster revenue, but Lambeau Field, in a remote, small town with a cold climate and no roof, has not historically hosted many. This year, that is changing with two Luke Combs concerts and the Notre Dame-Wisconsin college football game. The natural limitations on the venue still apply, Policy said, and they’ll still bank on a certain scarcity value for Lambeau events. “If we could do one concert, one football game and one other form of event a year, that would be great,” Policy said.
Is the economic playing field becoming un-leveled?
In some ways, Policy’s diagnosis of the problem is more interesting than his remedy. After all, hasn’t the NFL engaged in painstaking collective bargaining and difficult compromises among owners to ensure mom-and-pop teams in small markets stay competitive? He’s not the first to suggest that parity is at risk in this new age of wealth.
“Thank goodness for the salary cap, because without the salary cap there would be no Green Bay Packers, and I would argue there probably wouldn’t be a number of existing, very successful NFL teams that are around now,” Policy said. “But it only caps one thing, and that’s player salaries.”
Not capped: coaching salaries; buyouts for fired coaches; the overall size of coaching, training, nutrition and other support staff; and investment in practice facilities and playing venues, all of which have risen quickly in recent years. Also, the salary cap reflects total league revenues, meaning it could still end up hurting the Packers’ books if local revenue doesn’t keep up with the Joneses and Kroenkes. Another factor Policy didn’t mention: the now-routine practice of manipulating multiyear contracts to stay within the salary cap (a practice pioneered in the 1990s by his father), which requires owners to have the cash to pay out signing bonuses.
To be clear, Policy says, this is a mostly forward-looking concern. Right now, the league is as “competitive as ever,” he said. “Finance and economics really don’t play into our football decision-making right now, and it’s my job to ensure that it never does.”
Many NFL insiders, including Policy, believe the Packers’ unique nonprofit status and lack of a singular, all-powerful owner has been net positives over the years, because the team is run exclusively by professional managers and is never bogged down by family drama. But he’s not certain that will continue to be true.
“Given the pace that the expenses have accelerated over the past few years, if we find ourselves falling behind, it’s going to be really hard to catch up,” Policy said. “So, we have to keep ourselves in a position where we’re not falling behind.”
N.Y. Giants chairman Steve Tisch, who along with his siblings are selling their personal stakes in the club to trusts for their children. Variety via Getty Images
For starters, Steve, Jonathan and Laurie Tisch’s roles and titles are not changing in the foreseeable future, a Giants spokesman said. So the Giants chairman and executive vice president is Steve Tisch today, just as it was two months ago.
But also, note this: Their valuable Giants shares are staying in the family, in “trusts for the benefit of their respective children,” where some of the Tisch family shares have apparently resided since 2023, according to the memo. This is important. NFL policy lawyers wouldn’t quite put it like this, but in some ways, the NFL’s ownership policy is more concerned about families than individuals. Intra-family transactions tend to carry a presumption of legitimacy and are given special treatment to minimize tax liability and facilitate inheritance.
For instance, since 2022, the NFL has allowed veteran principal owners to maintain control of their team with as little as 1% equity — as long as their family collectively still holds at least 30%. That means they can transfer the lion’s share of the ownership to their children while not paying an exorbitant estate tax after their death or disrupting the status quo before then. In 2015, owners voted to allow irrevocable family trusts to own control stakes. One example of trust ownership: the Kansas City Chiefs are technically owned by four trusts that benefit the Hunt family. These anecdotes aren’t directly relevant to the Tisch situation because the Maras control the team, but it’s an illustration of how the league handles generational change, and how there’s not much here that necessarily suggests Steve Tisch intends to change anything about his involvement with the team.
It would be naïve to claim with certainty the Epstein storyline was a total nonfactor here, and future developments may cause us to look back on this day differently. But it’s also possible that the Maras’ and Tischs’ sale of a 10% interest to the Koch family in October generated the cash to pay the taxes associated with this transfer, and they’re simply ready to do it now.
Retired Browns C JC Tretter is one of three finalists for the NFLPA executive director position, ESPN reports. GETTY IMAGES
The NFL Players Association could elect a new executive director within days, a necessary but preliminary step toward possible talks with the NFL on a longer regular season.
A vote is expected this weekend during the NFLPA’s annual board of player representatives meeting, which starts Friday in San Diego, ESPN’s Kalyn Kahler and Don Van Natta Jr. reported Thursday. They note surprising energy behind the candidacy of JC Tretter, the retired Browns offensive lineman who served as both elected NFLPA president and later as chief strategy officer until last summer.
Whoever wins, the installment of a new executive director will unfreeze the NFL-NFLPA dynamic that’s been in a holding pattern since Howell resigned. The NFL has made clear that it’s ready to open the contract with an eye toward an 18-game regular season, but obviously the union wasn’t going to do anything with an interim leader.
That’s not to say the union will suddenly agree to negotiate right away. In fact, the NFL’s clear desire to move quickly gives the players some leverage, and a new executive director will want a breaking-in period. But for the first time since before last summer, we may start to get some clarity about what’s possible on the labor negotiations front — and by extension, the NFL schedule for the next few years.
A three-judge appeals panel expressed skepticism toward the NFL’s arguments in the high-stakes “NFL Sunday Ticket” antitrust lawsuit Monday, and many experts now think they’ll send the case back to the trial court for a do-over. But one law professor who watched the hearings thinks the league is poised to avoid its worst-case scenario.
Raiders RB Ashton Jeanty, Eagles WR DeVonta Smith and Saints RB Alvin Kamara are among the latest players confirmed to participate in the Fanatics Flag Football Classic. Meanwhile, SBJ’s Rob Schaefer notes the event is moving to L.A. from Saudia Arabia because of the U.S./Israel-Iran war. A rush to sell tickets and fill the new venue is now underway.
The NFL is mulling adding new windows this coming season, and Thanksgiving eve could be in play, sources told SBJ’s Austin Karp.
The PGA Tour and Brian Rolapp are tapping into the CEO’s former pipeline and NFL Films on a new production, “Chasing Sunday,” that centers on this week’s Players Championship, notes SBJ’s Josh Carpenter.
AI sports podcast startup Vokol signed its most high-profile user to date with the UFL, which will use its tech to automate the creation of audio content before, during and after games from the perspective of teams in all eight UFL markets, writes SBJ’s Joe Lemire.
