The Packers Lost Money on Football. They Made a Fortune on Everything Else.
$753.3 million in revenue, a $1.1 million operating loss, and $132.5 million in net income. The only publicly owned team in American professional sports just handed the entire NFL a look at its books, and the books say football and finance have quietly come apart.
The Green Bay Packers lost $1.1 million playing football last year.
Their first operating loss in a non-pandemic season since 1989. Thirty-six years. Not since before the salary cap existed, before ESPN was a decade old, before most of the NFL’s current owners had bought in.
They also made $132.5 million.
The loss is real. It’s also almost beside the point.
The team that lost money on football just had one of the best years in its history. The gain didn’t come from ticket sales, sponsorships, or the salary cap. It came from a stock position. Every other team in the NFL just watched this happen in a rival’s public filing and said nothing, because they don’t have to say anything. Green Bay is the only club required to open the books.
Here’s how the money actually moved.
The Loss That Isn’t a Loss
The Packers reported $753 million in total revenue for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2026, up 4.7% from the year before. Against that, expenses of roughly $754 million produced an operating loss of $1.1 million, a full reversal from the $83.7 million operating profit posted the year prior. Call it an $85 million swing in one fiscal year, on a team that had been profitable at the operating line every year but one since the Reagan administration.
Some of that loss is real cost, and some of it is paper. Sportico’s reporting notes the operating figure includes tens of millions of dollars in non-cash depreciation charges tied to construction around Lambeau Field, a number the club declined to break out. Depreciation doesn’t leave the building in cash. What did leave the building in cash is a different story, and it’s the one that actually explains the year.
Where the $130 Million Went
Player costs rose from roughly $310 million to somewhere between $440 million and $447 million. Sportico puts the figure at $440 million; Awful Announcing’s account of the earnings call has it at $447 million. The gap is probably a benefits-accounting question, not a disagreement about what happened. Either way, that’s a jump of roughly $130 million in a single year, and Packers president and CEO Ed Policy called it flatly an “abnormal year” driven by the structure and timing of player contracts.
The mechanics are worth naming, because they’ll repeat across the league. Green Bay traded for Micah Parsons and signed him to a $188 million contract with a $44 million signing bonus. It released Jaire Alexander, Elgton Jenkins and Nate Hobbs, and traded Rashan Gary and Kenny Clark. Awful Announcing’s reporting adds the detail that matters most here: by trading Clark, the Packers lost the ability to amortize his remaining bonus over the life of his deal and had to book it all at once. Roster turnover doesn’t just cost money. It changes when the money shows up on the income statement, and this year several of those bills landed in the same twelve months.
The Cap Is a Fiction, and Everyone in the Building Knows It
Here’s the number that should get more attention than the operating loss. The 2025 NFL salary cap was $279.2 million. Spotrac’s data, cited by Front Office Sports, put the Packers’ actual cap allocation at $290.1 million. Neither of those is what actually left the building. Player costs, including benefits and bonuses, ran $440 to $447 million.
That’s not a discrepancy. That’s the whole point of the cap: it governs future commitments, not current cash. A team can sign a $188 million contract, hand out a $44 million bonus, and have all of it hit the cap on a smooth, negotiated schedule over several years, right up until a trade or release accelerates the bill and collapses that schedule into one fiscal year. The cap tells you what a team owes. It doesn’t tell you what a team pays. Green Bay’s fiscal 2026 is the clearest illustration of that gap the league has produced in years.
It matters beyond one team’s balance sheet. The NFL’s labor deal runs through 2031, and commissioner Roger Goodell has already floated the idea that the cap’s structure might need revisiting. Every time a cash-cost year like this one gets reported publicly, it gives the league a data point for that argument, and gives the players’ union a data point for the opposite one.
The NFL Didn’t Sell a Media Asset. It Bought a Stock.
This is the real story in the filing, and it’s not really about Green Bay at all.
Earlier this year, the NFL traded NFL Network, RedZone and its fantasy football platform to ESPN for a 10% equity stake in ESPN itself, a stake valued at $3 billion when the deal closed. That equity doesn’t sit on ESPN’s books or the league office’s books in any way a fan would notice. It sits inside a vehicle called 32 Equity, and any gain or loss the entity produces flows through to all 32 teams, one thirty-second at a time, as non-operating income.
For the Packers, that thirty-second slice helped turn $1.9 million of non-operating income the year before into $133.6 million this year: a jump team president Ed Policy called almost a 7,000% increase. The club’s CFO, Maureen Smith, wouldn’t break out how much of that came from the ESPN mark-up versus general investment gains in the corporate reserve fund, which also benefited from an 18% year for the S&P 500. What she would confirm is the mechanism: it’s a mark-to-market gain on a stock position, run through the same accounting line as the team’s investment portfolio, not through anything resembling a football business.
Say that plainly: the single biggest driver of the best net income year in Packers history was a media company’s share price. Not attendance. Not sponsorship. Not the salary cap. A stock position the league acquired by trading away a cable network.
The League Bought High, and Its New Stock Is Cutting Staff
There’s an irony sitting right on top of this that’s too good to skip. The same week Green Bay disclosed the size of the ESPN windfall, ESPN itself was cutting jobs, including high-profile names at NFL Network and NFL Live, the very properties the league had just handed over. The league’s counterparty in a deal that’s now enriching all 32 franchises is simultaneously trimming the workforce that runs the programming it acquired.
That’s not a contradiction so much as a reminder of what actually happened in January. The NFL didn’t buy a media company because it wanted to run one. It bought equity because equity appreciates independent of whether the underlying business is healthy. ESPN’s operating headaches are ESPN’s problem. The league’s 10% just needs the stock to go up, and this year, it did.
Who Doesn’t Get a Cut
There’s an obvious next question, and it belongs to the NFL Players Association: that ESPN stake exists because of live football inventory the players generate every Sunday, and none of the appreciation on it touches a player’s paycheck. The cap is built off football revenue. A gain on a media equity stake, booked as non-operating income, isn’t football revenue by the league’s own accounting, even though the asset wouldn’t be worth anything without the games.
I’ve sat across the table from enough rights holders and counterparties to recognize this pattern immediately: whoever controls how a dollar gets categorized controls whether it’s shareable. Non-operating income is a categorization, not a law of physics. Expect the union to argue, loudly, ahead of 2031, that a gain built on the back of the product should be part of the number players negotiate against. Expect the league to argue just as loudly that it isn’t.
The Only Team That Has to Show You the Books
There’s a marketing story buried in this filing that gets less attention than the numbers, and it’s the more interesting one to me.
Green Bay remains owned by roughly 539,000 shareholders holding 5.2 million shares, stock that pays no dividend and can’t be traded. No billionaire, no institutional investor, no private equity fund sits behind this team. Instead there’s a corporate reserve fund that grew from $579 million to $701 million this year. That’s the closest thing the Packers have to a rich owner who can write a check. Policy said as much himself: “It’s important that we maintain and grow the fund just because we don’t have that wealthy owner.”
That structure is the reason this data exists at all. It’s also, at this exact moment in league history, a genuine point of differentiation the Packers have never had to market particularly hard, because for decades it read as quaint rather than strategic. It doesn’t read as quaint anymore. Every other NFL owner is being courted by institutional capital right now. Green Bay is structurally immune to that courtship, by charter, not by choice. In a league whose ownership base is being reshaped by private equity in real time, being the one team that literally cannot sell a piece of itself to a fund is a story, and Green Bay has underplayed it for years.
What $753 Million Buys You Against a $9.6 Billion Price Tag
Zoom out, and the gap between operating economics and franchise value gets even stranger.
Sportico’s reporting on this filing notes NFL clubs are trading hands at more than $10 billion with average team EBITDA around $150 million, meaning the league is pricing franchises at roughly 65 to 70 times operating earnings on the current going rate. And the going rate keeps resetting. The Denver Broncos sold for $4.65 billion in 2022. The Washington Commanders went for $6.05 billion in 2023. This July, a 1% stake in the Miami Dolphins sold at a $12.5 billion valuation, and the Seattle Seahawks sold outright for a record $9.612 billion to a group led by Vinod Khosla.
None of those buyers were pricing this year’s operating income. They were pricing media rights that renew regardless of any single season’s player costs, a fixed 32-team supply of franchises that never expands to meet demand, and a national revenue pool that’s grown roughly 50% over five years and now sits at an implied $14.5 billion, up 4.8% this year alone, per the Packers’ own $453.2 million share.
Green Bay can’t be sold, so it will never test that multiple directly. But its financials confirm the underlying trend every acquirer is betting on: national revenue keeps compounding, largely insulated from any one team’s roster decisions or coaching changes. That’s what a $9.6 billion buyer is actually purchasing. Not a football team having a good year. A claim on a revenue stream that barely notices when a football team has a bad one.
The Through Line
Watch 2031, not this year’s income statement. The operating loss is a one-time artifact of contract timing, and Policy is right that it won’t repeat in this exact form. What will repeat, and grow, is the gap this filing just made visible: the widening distance between what a football team earns playing football and what its ownership structure earns doing everything else: equity stakes, investment portfolios, franchise appreciation none of it has to sell to realize.
The smart move for the league is to keep that gap fuzzy for as long as possible. The smart move for the union is to make it as sharp and countable as this one filing just did. Green Bay didn’t mean to hand either side ammunition. It’s required to publish a number every July, and this year the number told on the whole business.
Sources: Sportico, Front Office Sports, Awful Announcing, Front Office Sports (FY2025), Sportico (FY2024), Packers.com (FY2023), CBS Sports, ESPN on the Seahawks sale, AOL/USA Today on franchise sale history.