Green Bay Packers
The Green Bay Packers are a professional American football team based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Packers compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the National Football Conference (NFC) North division. It is the third-oldest franchise in the NFL, dating back to 1919,[11][12] and is the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team based in the United States.[a][13] Home games have been played at Lambeau Field since 1957. They have the most wins of any NFL franchise.[14][15]
"Packers" redirects here. For other uses, see Packers (disambiguation).Green Bay Packers
Green Bay Packers, Inc. (537,460 stockholders – governed by a Board of Directors)[4][5]
Mark Murphy
Mark Murphy
The Packers are the last of the "small-town teams" that were common in the NFL during the league's early days of the 1920s and 1930s. Founded in 1919 by Earl "Curly" Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun, the franchise traces its lineage to other semi-professional teams in Green Bay dating back to 1896. Between 1919 and 1920, the Packers competed against other semi-pro clubs from around Wisconsin and the Midwest, before joining the American Professional Football Association (APFA), the forerunner of today's NFL, in 1921. In 1933, the Packers began playing part of their home slate in Milwaukee until changes at Lambeau Field in 1995 made it more lucrative to stay in Green Bay full-time; Milwaukee is still considered a home media market for the team.[16][17][18] Although Green Bay is by far the smallest major league professional sports market in North America,[a][19] Forbes ranked the Packers as the world's 27th-most-valuable sports franchise in 2019, with a value of $2.63 billion.[20]
The Packers have won 13 league championships, the most in NFL history, with nine pre-Super Bowl NFL titles and four Super Bowl victories. The Packers, under coach Vince Lombardi, won the first two Super Bowls in 1966 and 1967; they were the only NFL team to defeat the American Football League (AFL) before the AFL–NFL merger. After Lombardi retired, the Super Bowl trophy was named for him, but the team struggled through the 1970s and 1980s. Since 1993, the team has enjoyed much regular-season success, making the playoffs 23 times and winning two Super Bowls in 1996 under head coach Mike Holmgren and 2010 under head coach Mike McCarthy.[21] The Packers have the most wins (826) and the second-highest win–loss record (.571) in NFL history, including both regular season and playoff games.[22][23]
The Packers are longstanding adversaries of the Chicago Bears, Minnesota Vikings, and Detroit Lions, who today form the NFL's NFC North division (formerly known as the NFC Central Division). They have played more than 100 games against each of those teams, and have a winning overall record against all of them, a distinction only shared with the Kansas City Chiefs, Dallas Cowboys, and Miami Dolphins. The Bears–Packers rivalry is one of the oldest rivalries in U.S. professional sports history, dating to 1921.