Spurred by the ability to sell pieces of teams to private-equity funds, plenty of NFL owners have been converting slivers of equity into stacks of cash. Most recently, Dolphins owner Stephen Ross sold one percent of his team at a $12.5 billion valuation.
The lone publicly-owned franchise could be at risk of being left behind.
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In a recent interview with Ben Fischer of Sports Business Journal, Packers president and CEO Ed Policy expressed concern that the Packers are at a disadvantage when it comes to the increasing flow of money that the 31 other franchises are in position to capture.
“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 told Fischer.
That forces Policy to find ways to generate more revenue for the Packers — with a stadium naming-rights deal possibly inching toward being on the table.
“We’re soon to be the only stadium without naming rights,” Policy said. “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.”
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Still, it sounds as if Lambeau Field presented by Google, or something truly jaunty like Fontainebleu Lambeau Field, could be coming, sooner or later.
One way to raise money is to raise ticket prices. This year, face values for Packers home games are rising by three to 11 percent. And there’s more meat on the bone, given the basic realities of supply and demand.
“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.
That’s the team’s biggest selling point. No effort is needed to sell tickets to games. The massive, six-figure waiting list shows that the price point is too low.
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Ultimately, the Packers may have no choice but to make the game-day experience more expensive. As franchise values go up and up and as the people who buy teams become richer and richer, the Packers could be running out of options to compete with the oligarchs who collect sports franchises as part of the broader competition to get more.
For now, it’s not a crisis. Policy wants to be sure that doesn’t happen.
“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,” Policy told Fischer. “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. So, we have to keep ourselves in a position where we’re not falling behind.”
A cynic would see this as a part of the potential plan by owners to overhaul the cap system in the next round of labor negotiations. Especially since the Packers still emerged from their most recent fiscal year with a profit of $83.7 million.
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If that number starts to drop, it could be a problem. Then again, the Packers can always sell more stock to folks who’d like to put an ownership certificate in a frame, right next to the spot where they hang their cheeseheads.
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