Green Bay Press-Gazette reporter Richard Ryman responds to fans’ questions about the Green Bay Packers. This is a regular feature published weekly as long as there are questions to answer.
You can send questions to rryman@usatodayco.com.
Kit: I am curious how the Packers handle player housing, during training camp especially? Players are coming and going, while some remain with the the team during most of the summer before they are cut. Living in hotels? Do Packers help with housing for players who make the team and are here for the season? For those who join the team in a trade? What happens to those residences when most of the players leave at season end. Does the team keep rentals available for the next season?
Richard Ryman: Kit, during training camp, Packers players live in a residential hotel leased by the team. That’s because they want teammates to get to know one another and bond, to be laser-focused on football and, as you mentioned, because some of them might be moving on by the end of camp. The Packers for many years used the dorms at St. Norbert College, but the team and the players literally outgrew that arrangement.
The Packers do not provide housing during the season. It’s up to the players to rent or buy. Most rent, but a fair number buy. Last season, more than a dozen players and two dozen coaches owned houses. And to be fair, most of them can afford it, especially in Green Bay, where a $1 million goes farther than it would any virtually any other NFL city.
Football now is a full-time job, especially for coaches, so having permanent residences in Green Bay makes sense. When NFL seasons were shorter, ending in December if you didn’t make the playoffs and in January if you did, and off-season activities were not a thing, players could be gone for six months. The season doesn’t end until mid-January now, the Super Bowl is in February, and OTAs and minicamps are in May and June, before training camp starts in late July.
I wrote a story in 2021 discussing why players and coaches, even when they know they might not be here long, take the risk of buying a house. The cost of houses has changed since then, but the reasons, which are not different than for you and I, haven’t. The link to that story is below:
When a player comes in during the season, whether by trade or free agent signing, the team does help them get settled. While the team does not own or lease apartments, it has contacts in the community who can assist players. And players can be counted on to advise one another on places to live.
When players come in for temporary visits, like tryouts, physicals, pre-draft visits and the like, the team does arrange accommodations.
Lambeau Field naming rights
Chuck: Soldier Field will soon be replaced by a “to-be-named” domed stadium, and Lambeau Field would then become the only NFL stadium without a corporate sponsor in its name. I think this adds even more to the Packers’ brand and mystique. Is there anything in our bylaws or corporate structure that ensures our stadium will remain named as is?
Richard Ryman: Chuck, there is nothing in the bylaws to restrict naming rights for the stadium. In fact, the Green Bay City Council and the Packers negotiated a naming-rights plan in 2000 that would have given the city a 50-50 split.
Brown County voters in September 2000 approved a 0.5% sales tax that funded much of the $295 million renovation, and in November of that year voters approved by a 53%-47% vote an advisory referendum in favor of selling naming rights. Even then-Packers President and CEO Bob Harlan said he was more comfortable with the idea as a result of the vote, although they had no offers on the table.
Selling naming rights was still a possibility in early 2003, as Lambeau Field was being renovated, but by fall the Packers had cooled to the idea. The Press-Gazette contacted some of the bigger companies around the state in early 2003 and they expressed little interest as well. Had they known the future, they might have thought otherwise.
By the fall, some city council members were annoyed that no deal was likely and were thinking of trying to charge the Packers for NOT selling naming rights. Nothing came of that either.
The ardor on the part of the Packers for selling stadium naming rights cooled, if it was even very warm to start with. To be fair, the Packers sold naming rights and advertising to practically every other space and flat surface at Lambeau Field, but Lambeau remains Lambeau-only to this day.
A changing NFL financial structure allows the other 31 franchises in the league to raise hundreds of millions of dollars by selling equity in their teams, something the publicly owned but nonprofit Packers cannot do.
I wrote about that challenge twice last year:
Whether the Packers revisit the idea of naming rights will depend on how much local income they can raise without selling those rights, and whether anyone wants to pay what the Packers think it’s worth to mess with history and likely upset a large portion of their fanbase. For now, it’s not something they would pursue.
In a recent interview, Packers President and CEO Ed Policy said, “We’re soon to be the only stadium without naming rights. 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 [the real estate development next to Lambeau Field].”
Of course, fans have their own way of dealing with such things. How often do you still hear Miller Park mentioned in conversation? Or Sears Tower?
Contact Richard Ryman at rryman@usatodayco.com. Follow him on X at @RichRymanPG and on Instagram at @rrymanPG.
This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Packers player housing, Lambeau Field naming rights questions answered
Reporting by Richard Ryman, Green Bay Press-Gazette / Green Bay Press-Gazette
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