Once a year, the Green Bay Packers release earnings, giving a glimpse into the economics of the largely private business of the NFL.
The Packers are an NFL anomaly: a public company whose shares don’t trade. The team went public in the 1920s and was grandfathered in when the NFL banned public ownership in 1960.
Because the NFL splits national revenue from sponsorship and licensing evenly among its 32 teams, it’s possible to ballpark how much the league is earning. Wednesday is Packers’ earning day. In the fiscal year ended March 31, 2025, the NFL distributed $432.6 million in national revenue to the Packers, up from $402.3 million the year before.
That means the NFL had approximately $13.8 billion in national revenues for the year ended March 31, up just under $1 billion from the previous year. The Packers don’t break national revenues into their constituent parts, but clearly the bulk of their media revenue comes from broadcast, cable, and streaming. Sponsorship is over $1 billion.
Mark Murphy, the soon-retiring Packers president, said the NFL media contracts grow about 7 percent a year, so that every NFL team can expect robust revenue growth. And players can expect a rising salary cap through the end of the media deals in 2033. The NFL has an opt-out provision in its 2029 contracts, which the league is expected to trigger, but only if it believes it can generate more revenue.
Overall, the Packers reported $719.1 million of revenue, up 9.9 percent. Local revenue rose 13.7 percent to $286.4 million on the strength of a ninth home game last season. The NFL introduced a 17-game schedule in 2021, and teams now alternate between eight home games and nine annually. Therefore, the local revenue line will fluctuate. Next year, the figure is likely to be lower.
Local revenues, of course, differ from team to team, so it’s not possible to use the Packers figure to deduce total local revenue across the league. The Packers figure is in the high second quartile of the league, Murphy said. Still, NFL total revenues are believed to be in the $20 billion range, if not a bit north of that number.
The Packers reported profit from operations of $83.7 million, up 39.3 percent. Non-operating income, mainly consisting of investment gains, decreased to $1.9 million from a robust $38 million the previous year. As a result, net income was down 12.8 percent to $85.6 million.
The Packers are unique in the NFL in not having an owner, well enough, a deep-pocketed one. Other teams largely have ultra-wealthy owners, and now they have the right to sell up to 10 percent of their franchise to private equity firms. The Packers have been funding a corporate reserve, which, as of the end of the last fiscal year, stood at $579 million.
Karl Schmidt, a member of the Packers’ executive committee, said the goal is to reach 10 percent of the franchise’s valuation in the reserve. The Commanders were sold for $6 billion in 2023, and earlier this year, the Los Angeles Lakers were valued at $10 billion in a pending change of control deal, suggesting that the earlier Washington price tag is low. The Packers likely need at least an additional $100 million, if not more, to achieve that 10 percent objective.
One place the Packers won’t raise money is by selling naming rights to Lambeau Field. Murphy scoffed at the idea, saying the amount of cash the team could generate would hardly be worth tarnishing the Lambeau name.
About Daniel Kaplan
Daniel Kaplan has been covering the business of sports for more than two decades. A proud founding reporter of SportsBusiness Journal, he spent the last four years at The Athletic.