The National Football League (NFL) has only one team entirely owned by shareholders, the Green Bay Packers. The shareholders are governed by Board of Directors who are elected by the shareholders. The Packers were able to keep its shareholder ownership by getting grandfathered in due to the creation of the NFL constitution in 1970. In the NFL constitution, article III section 3.2a it states, “no corporation, association, partnership, or other entity not operated for profit nor any charitable organization or entity not presently a member of the League shall be eligible for membership”. There are however, certain limitations of this ownership ability such as people cannot sell their shares for profit and there is a strict limit on the amount of shares that anyone can buy. This prevents one person from acquiring a huge portion of ownership and the stock does not pay out dividends, like other stocks. There is no monetary value that any shareholder gets; they simply get a piece of paper that states they are owners. Which in my opinion, is better than earning dividends. Throughout the course of the Packers history, there has only been five occasions where the company offered sale of its stock. The first three times occurred in the 1920s which …show more content…
The rule should be changed because it would help teams in financially binding situations. For instance the St. Louis Rams were in a difficult situation when they were trying to move out of St. Louis to Los Angeles. The relationship between Stan Kroenke, the owner, and the city, wasn’t necessarily a warm one which made the situation ten times worse. By allowing NFL teams to be publicly owned creates not only a better relationship between the team and the city but most importantly allows for teams to be better suited