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Rob Demovsky
GREEN BAY, Wis. — Eighteen years ago, when Mark Murphy gave his first financial report after taking over as president of the Green Bay Packers, the NFL’s revenue sharing was $138 million per team.
On Wednesday, just days before Murphy officially will retire and hand over control to incoming president Ed Policy, the Packers revealed that their national revenue sharing from the previous fiscal year was $432.6 million — a year after national revenue topped $400 million per team (at $402.3 million) for the first time.
“I continue to be amazed by the popularity of the NFL and by the league office’s ability to generate revenue,” Murphy said. “It’s impressive.”
The team’s finances are the only window into the NFL’s revenue-sharing numbers because as the only publicly owned team, the Packers are required to reveal their financial statement on an annual basis.
With $432.6 million distributed to each of the 32 NFL teams, it means the league shared more than $13 billion in revenue from the previous fiscal year.
Murphy, along with Maureen Smith (Packers chief financial officer) and Karl Schmidt (treasurer of the team’s executive committee), shared the numbers that they will present to their stockholders during the annual shareholder meeting Friday at Lambeau Field. Murphy said national revenue accounts for about 60% of the Packers’ total revenue.
“That’s mostly the growth in the national TV deals,” Murphy said. “The league has it so they’re trying to grow at about a 7% growth rate annually. And then the other thing I think the league’s done a good job of is moving more towards streaming, but still a vast majority of our national revenue is coming from broadcast television.”
That helped the Packers’ profit from operations increase from $60.1 million to $83.7 million over the previous year. Local revenue, boosted by hosting a ninth regular-season home game since the league went to a 17-game schedule, increased from $251.8 million to $286.4 million. The Packers’ corporate reserve fund also grew to $579 million, up from $536 million the previous year.
Because the Packers are publicly owned by more than a half-million shareholders, they are unable to accept private equity investments the way some teams have done to raise money. According to the team, there are approximately 5,204,615 shares of stock owned by 539,029 stockholders — none of whom receive any dividends. To protect against someone taking control of the team, no single person can own more than 200,000 shares.
Murphy said during his tenure the Packers have invested $675 million into Lambeau Field and the team’s facilities. They unveiled a newly renovated locker room this week.
“We don’t have a deep-pocketed wealthy owner so that’s one of the things we’ve tried to do over the years is to build up the corporate reserve fund,” Murphy said. “I think it’s especially important now with other teams’ ability to sell minority shares as well as private equity up to 10% of their value.”