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Mark H. Murphy, on the Lambeau Field bleachers, is the first person to win Super Bowls as both player and CEO Matthias Clamer
Know Your Packers Backers
Given his history as a former player rep, Murphy took a surprisingly hard line. In an interview with the Freakonomics blog, Murphy said, discussing pensions and severance payouts for players whose careers are curtailed by injuries, “I really wonder, sometimes, if we do too much for the players.” He went on to state that they might make a smoother transition to their next careers if they had “an incentive to get a job.” NFLPA representatives were so angered by his comments that at one point they refused to negotiate if Murphy remained in the room.
The new collective bargaining agreement, completed just in time for the season, calls for players to get 48 percent of revenue—the same amount they were getting at the time of the 1982 strike. “But there is a lot more revenue and there is free agency,” Murphy says. “Players aren’t getting the shaft anymore.”
That may be true—the median NFL salary today is $770,000 a year—but there remain fundamental issues dividing management and players. Sports agent J.R. Rickert, who represents 40 NFL players, says, “To get guaranteed contracts like in the National Basketball Assn. or Major League Baseball, that’s something players will continue to fight for. As far as retiree benefits … those benefits increased, but it started out so low that was not a high bar.”
Murphy insists there was nothing hypocritical about his negotiating position. “As you mature, you have more perspective. Look, I do think the players were getting screwed in the ’80s. But the situation is completely different now. First of all, they have more rights. There’s a level of respect between players and owners that we did not have in the ’80s. But, yeah, I’m on the opposite side now.” He adds, “Sometimes it’s difficult balancing my personal and professional philosophies, but I also began evolving a long time ago.”
The Packers occupy a unique niche in the NFL. It is hard to question their financial motives since there is no individual owner in Green Bay who stands to benefit from any particular league policy. Former Commissioner Tagliabue calls Green Bay’s position “moral purity or economic objectivity. Whatever it is, it is useful.” When it came time to getting the other owners to ratify the new collective bargaining agreement, Goodell dispatched Murphy, representing the morally “pure” Packers, to talk to them and explain the nuances of the deal. “He played a huge role in getting this done,” says Goodell. “A huge role.”
While some other NFL owners don’t always accept the Packers’ CEO as a true equal—“there is this sense among some of them that he doesn’t have any skin in the game,” says Tagliabue—there’s no question that for Murphy, that moment, of negotiating on behalf of management against players, was the culmination of a surprising rise, of player to almost-owner. And it’s one that is possible only in Green Bay.
The Packers survive because of a quirk of historical circumstances. If the organization’s bylaws allowed any shareholder to acquire more than 200,000 shares, and if the team itself hadn’t been so successful on the field and built up this level of loyalty, would it still be in Green Bay? More likely than not, the Packers would have gone the way of other small-market franchises, either folding or moving to a larger market decades ago.
The Packers have benefited from a league structure that’s orderly, predictable, and by the standards of other sports, egalitarian: The bulk of the Packers’ revenues, $96 million, still comes from the team’s share of the NFL’s television deal, which is split evenly among all 32 franchises. Nothing like the Packers can happen again. The NFL’s ownership rules forbid the model of public shareholders; the NFL’s goal is to ensure that clubs have a single owner with financial resources and management accountability. The league doesn’t want proxy battles for control of franchises, with the winners able to move the team at will. And even if long-suffering small-market teams such as the Cleveland Browns or Buffalo Bills were allowed to copy the Packers’ ownership structure, it’s unlikely they could sustain it. Considering the current valuation of NFL franchises—about $1 billion each on average, according to Forbes—it would be hard to raise that kind of money without giving the shareholders a dividend or a potential to resell shares at a higher value.
Ultimately, the Packers are able to thrive in ways others cannot because the team is a cultural icon—a symbol of America’s love of the underdog who overperforms. The intensity of feeling at Lambeau every home game is common to only a handful of other pro sports venues in the country—Fenway Park before a playoff game might come closest. There is the game on the field, and then there is the sense of those 60,000 in attendance that they are involved in something bigger than the sport; they’re honoring a compact.
As he paces the sidelines before the kickoff, Mark Murphy is mindful of that heritage, that special bond between team and town that he is charged with carrying forward. “We’re stewards,” he says, looking up from the playing field to the fans filing into Lambeau. “We’re taking care of the Packers for the next generation.”
Greenfeld is a Bloomberg Businessweek contributor.
