The legacy of community ownership

Welcome to Legacy Beyond Profits, where we explore what it really means to build a business that leaves a mark for the right reasons.

For most sports teams, their owners treat them as possessions for the wealthy, and these assets can be used, moved, or sold if a more advantageous stadium arrangement appears in a different city. This transactional mindset has uprooted teams from Oakland, St. Louis, San Diego, and countless other cities whose fans invested decades of loyalty only to watch their teams chase larger markets and newer arenas.

Building legacy through community ownership requires structural courage—encoding into your organization's DNA the impossibility of extraction. Andrew Turnbull and a group of Wisconsin businessmen faced bankruptcy in 1922 and chose to create something that could never be sold, proving that the most durable competitive advantages come not from what you own, but from what you make impossible to own.

From billionaire trophy to community asset

1. Structure impossibility, not just difficulty

The counterintuitive move: don't just make selling hard—make it structurally pointless. The Packers' original 1923 articles of incorporation stipulated that if the team were ever sold, all profits would go to the local American Legion post. No shareholder could profit from a sale, eliminating any financial incentive to approve one. This isn't a cultural norm or a gentleman's agreement—it's encoded into the organization's legal DNA, making extraction impossible regardless of who sits on the board.

2. Distribute ownership so widely that control becomes impossible

A 200,000-share cap prevents any individual from owning more than 4% of outstanding shares. With 538,967 shareholders holding 5.2 million shares, no billionaire can accumulate enough ownership to force decisions. The Packers don't stay in Green Bay because owners choose to—they stay because the structure makes leaving mathematically impossible. Distributed ownership transforms stakeholder alignment from aspiration into architecture.

3. Make "shareholders" mean something beyond investment returns

Packers stock pays no dividends, cannot be traded, provides no equity interest, and offers no securities-law protection. What shareholders receive: voting rights, an annual meeting invitation, and exclusive merchandise access. Over half a million people own shares anyway. When ownership represents belonging rather than investment, you attract stakeholders who want the organization to exist—not stakeholders calculating exit multiples.

4. Let transparency replace trust

As the only NFL team required to publish financial results, the Packers operate with accountability that privately-held franchises avoid. Fans know exactly how revenue gets allocated. This transparency builds institutional trust that survives leadership transitions, economic downturns, and losing seasons. The community doesn't need to trust any individual owner—the structure itself is trustworthy.

How Andrew Turnbull saved the Packers by making them impossible to own

In November 1922, the Green Bay Packers were dying. A 12-hour rainfall had ruined their Thanksgiving game against Duluth, and the team couldn't afford to pay visiting players. The franchise that Earl "Curly" Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun had founded three years earlier—funded by $500 from the Indian Packing Company—was weeks from collapse.

Andrew Turnbull, publisher of the Green Bay Press-Gazette, made the owners an unusual proposition. Play the game despite certain financial loss, and I will rally the business community behind you. They played. The team lost money. Turnbull kept his promise.

A week later, 150 community leaders gathered at a meeting Turnbull organized. The solution they devised was radical: transform the Packers into a non-profit, publicly-owned corporation. On August 18, 1923, the Green Bay Football Corporation filed its articles of incorporation with a provision that would prove revolutionary—if the franchise were ever sold, all proceeds would go to charity. No individual could ever profit from selling the team.

The first stock sale raised $5,500 through 1,000 shares at $5 each. Shareholders were required to buy six season tickets. The structure was designed not to enrich investors but to ensure survival.

The Packers nearly died again in 1935, entering receivership after losing a lawsuit brought by an injured fan. A second stock sale raised $15,000 and reorganized the corporation. They nearly died in 1950, when post-war financial pressures and founder Curly Lambeau's departure threatened the franchise. A third stock sale raised $118,000. Each crisis validated the model: when the community owns the team, the community saves it.

By 2000, the NFL had pared down small-market teams and imposed ownership rules that would have prohibited the Packers' structure if they weren't grandfathered in. Yet Green Bay—population 107,000, the smallest market in North American professional sports—still fields one of the league's most valuable franchises. The Packers are worth $6.65 billion despite generating less local revenue than teams in cities twenty times their size.

The waiting list for season tickets contains 148,000 names—more than the city's entire population. Fans wait 30 to 50 years; parents add newborns to the list at birth. Every game has sold out since 1960. The 99.4% season ticket renewal rate means fewer than 100 tickets change hands annually.

When asked in 2000 what would happen if voters rejected a stadium referendum, team president Bob Harlan answered: "Plan C is death." The referendum passed 53-47%. The community chose to keep its team—as it has chosen six times across a century of stock sales, stadium votes, and financial crises.

The Packers' competitors have relocated from Oakland to Las Vegas, from St. Louis to Los Angeles, from San Diego to Los Angeles. Every small-town team that existed when Green Bay joined the NFL in 1921 has either folded or moved to larger markets. The Packers remain because they built an organization that structurally cannot leave.

From strategy to legacy

Community ownership challenges the assumption that organizations exist to generate returns for investors. The Packers' achievement: Turnbull and his colleagues built a structure where 538,967 shareholders have voting rights but no extraction rights—where belonging replaces speculation as the primary ownership motivation.

This pattern extends beyond sports. Cooperative banks like Germany's Sparkassen have operated for centuries under structures that prevent acquisition and mandate community reinvestment. Mutual insurance companies exist to serve policyholders rather than shareholders. Land trusts preserve affordable housing by removing properties from speculative markets permanently. In each case, the insight is identical: some assets are too important to be ownable.

Turnbull's genius: understanding that a football team could become a civic institution by making ownership meaningful and sale impossible. The Packers don't thrive because their shareholders are wealthy. They thrive because three generations of structural decisions made serving Green Bay the only path forward—regardless of who holds the shares or sits on the board.