Public and Community Ownership of Sports Teams — Working Draft
The land, the building, and the team: three distinct ownership questions
Every case below breaks cleanly into three questions that are easy to conflate in casual discussion.
- Who owns the land the venue sits on?
- Who owns the building (arena/stadium structure)?
- Who owns the team — the franchise, roster, and league membership itself?
Public ownership of (1) and (2) is common in American pro sports — cities and counties routinely own the venue and lease it to a privately owned team. Public ownership of (3) — the franchise itself — is, per this research, essentially unprecedented in the U.S. major leagues, and actively barred by at least one league's bylaws. That gap is the load-bearing finding of this research project and the legislative proposal it supports, especially Title II: The Franchise Ownership Structure Reform Act. Our research on Portland's Moda Center is a case study of a phenomenon many other metropolises have faced: a new team owner threatens to pack up the franchise and leave town if the local governments don't finance excessive capital improvements to the Arena at taxpayer expense - meanwhile local governments don't enjoy any cut of ticket revenue. The problem exists because neither local governments nor local non-profit shareholder corporations comprised of loyal fans and local business and civic bodies, are allowed to purchase an NBA team.
2. Green Bay Packers: community ownership, not government ownership — and why no one else has it
The Packers are the case people reach for when they hear "publicly owned team."
What it actually is. Green Bay Packers, Inc. is a Wisconsin nonstock (nonprofit) corporation, incorporated 1923, with 538,967 shareholders holding 5,204,625 shares as of the most recent count. No individual may hold more than 200,000 shares (~4%). Shares pay no dividends, have no market value, cannot be traded, and can be resold only back to the corporation or transferred within a family. If the corporation ever dissolved, remaining assets would go to the Green Bay Packers Foundation for Wisconsin charitable purposes. There have been six stock sales (1923, 1935, 1950, 1997–98, 2011–12, 2021–22), each tied to a specific capital need — most recently Lambeau Field upgrades. (Packers.com; Wikipedia)
What it is not: government ownership. The ~539,000 shareholders are private individuals — fans — not the City of Green Bay or Brown County. Neither government has an equity stake. This is community/shareholder ownership, a meaningfully different structure from "a municipality owns the team," and conflating the two would undercut the precision this project has otherwise tried to maintain on legal claims. (Wikipedia; The Conversation)
The NFL banned this model for everyone else. In 1960, the NFL amended its Constitution to bar "charitable organizations and/or corporations not organized for profit and not now a member of the league" from holding league membership — an explicit grandfather clause protecting only the Packers, who already belonged. (Exact current article/section numbering is cited inconsistently across secondary sources and could not be confirmed against a clean primary-text copy of the current Constitution in this research pass — treat the existence and effect of the rule as well-corroborated, and any specific article-number citation as needing a primary-source check before use.) A separate, later rule (commonly dated to the 1980s, tightened again in 2004 and 2009) independently requires a single controlling owner to hold at least 30% equity — which would make a Packers-style diffuse-shareholder structure structurally impossible even without the 1960 rule. Notably, the New England Patriots were also community-owned at the 1970 AFL-NFL merger and grandfathered in alongside Green Bay, but owner Billy Sullivan bought out all public shares in 1976 — meaning Green Bay is the last survivor of a model that briefly had two examples, not an eternal one-off. (PBS; Marquette Law School faculty blog; Greenberg Law Office)
No equivalent exists in the NBA, MLB, or NHL, though the mechanisms differ. The NBA's Constitution, Article 2.5(j), makes it "the policy of the Association not to approve a proposed transfer of an interest in a Member or Membership to... any governmental or quasi-governmental authority, agency, or instrumentality," unless the Board of Governors finds "a compelling reason to the contrary" — a strong presumption against government ownership, but, unlike the NFL's categorical bar on nonprofit/charitable membership, formally a waivable Board policy rather than an unconditional prohibition; combined with the supermajority Board approval required for any ownership transfer, incumbent owners retain a practical veto over any community- or government-ownership bid regardless of how the textual question comes out. MLB has grandfathered publicly traded ownership (Toronto Blue Jays via Rogers Communications; Atlanta Braves via Nasdaq-listed Atlanta Braves Holdings) — but that is ordinary for-profit, dividend/appreciation-eligible stock, the functional opposite of Green Bay's non-tradable, no-dividend nonprofit shares, and should not be described as "community ownership" in the Packers sense. MLS operates as a single entity where the league itself owns every team, foreclosing the question differently. (NBA Constitution, Article 2.5(j); Sportico)
Lambeau Field, separately, is publicly owned — not by the City of Green Bay directly (a commonly repeated imprecision), but by the Green Bay/Brown County Professional Football Stadium District, a special-purpose government body created by the Wisconsin legislature in 1999 specifically to oversee the 2000–2003 stadium renovation, financed substantially by a voter-approved 0.5% Brown County sales tax (2000 referendum, 53%–47%). A 2026 legislative proposal (Rep. David Steffen) would fold the District into the City of Green Bay directly, on the argument that the District has completed its original purpose — not yet enacted. (Green Bay/Brown County Professional Football Stadium District; WPR)
3. Minor League Baseball: how the affiliate system actually works now
This project's argument about closed-franchise monopolies extends more directly than expected into the minors, and the ownership picture there is more relevant to the "public alternative" question than it might first appear.
The 2021 reorganization put MLB in direct control. The old Professional Baseball Agreement between MLB and the independent National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (MiLB's own governing body since 1901) expired September 30, 2020, and MLB deliberately let it lapse rather than renew. In its place, MLB issues Professional Development Licenses (PDLs) directly to each of 120 individual clubs (down from ~160), each running 10 years, through the 2030 season. MiLB as an independent organization effectively ceased to exist — MLB's own office now sets facility standards, controls scheduling and affiliate assignment, and employs the players, coaches, and trainers at every affiliate directly; the local club owner runs business and ballpark operations only. (Ballpark Digest; MLB.com)
Ownership is a mix, and it's shifting fast toward consolidation. Most MiLB clubs remain independently/locally owned businesses holding a PDL (e.g., Buffalo Bisons — Rich Products Corp. since 1983; Durham Bulls — Capitol Broadcasting since 1990). But a nontrivial number are owned outright by their MLB parent club — the Cardinals bought the Memphis Redbirds outright in 2014 from a nonprofit foundation; the Astros and Rangers each directly owned several of their own affiliates until recently selling them off. More significant for this project's monopoly argument: Diamond Baseball Holdings, a private-equity-backed roll-up (Endeavor-founded, now Silver Lake-backed), now owns roughly 40% of all 120 MiLB teams — a single financialized owner across dozens of nominally "local" franchises, which has extracted an estimated $275–300 million in public subsidies across its portfolio in about three years. The "locally owned small-town team" framing of MiLB is increasingly outdated. (Wikipedia: Diamond Baseball Holdings; Defector)
True municipal ownership of a minor-league franchise has actually happened, once, clearly. The City of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania bought the Harrisburg Senators outright for $6.7 million in 1995 specifically to block their relocation to Springfield, Massachusetts — the clearest verified U.S. example of a government directly owning a professional baseball franchise, not merely its ballpark. The city ran the team as a municipal asset for over a decade before selling it in 2007 for $13.25 million with a 29-year stay clause attached. (Wikipedia: Harrisburg Senators)
A Green Bay-style nonprofit/shareholder model also exists at the minor-league level, and is still active today. The Rochester Red Wings have been owned since 1957 by Rochester Community Baseball, Inc., a nonprofit formed when a local stock drive of 8,221 shareholders bought the team from the Cardinals — the "72 Day Miracle." Along with the Packers, this is one of only two current publicly/community-owned professional franchises in the U.S. that this research could confirm. (Wikipedia: Rochester Community Baseball)
Two more examples surfaced on a later verification pass, though neither is a current community-owned team — they don't change the "only two current examples" count above, but they show the model was tried more widely than that count alone suggests. The Wisconsin Timber Rattlers (Appleton) were owned by the nonprofit Appleton Baseball Club, Inc. (240 members, $25/share, a 21-member elected board, explicitly modeled on Green Bay) until a 2020 sale to Third Base Ventures and a 2025 resale to Diamond Baseball Holdings. The Syracuse Chiefs/SkyChiefs were community-owned from 1961–2018 by the Community Baseball Club of Central New York (~4,000 shareholders, no one able to vote more than 500 of 15,857 shares) before an 88%-approved 2017 sale to the New York Mets for roughly $18 million; sources are split on whether that entity was formally a nonprofit corporation, so it is described here as community/shareholder-owned rather than asserted as nonprofit specifically. (MiLB.com; Fox11 Online; Wikipedia: Community Baseball Club of Central New York)
Ballparks, as with the majors, are commonly city- or county-owned even when the team is not: Durham Bulls Athletic Park (City of Durham), Sahlen Field (City of Buffalo), and AutoZone Park (City of Memphis — reacquired from the defaulted Memphis Redbirds Foundation when the deal closed March 28, 2014) are all publicly owned facilities leased to privately (or PE-)owned teams — the same "public venue, private franchise" pattern seen at the MLB level. (Durham Bulls Athletic Park, Wikipedia; Sahlen Field, Wikipedia; AutoZone Park, Wikipedia; Memphis approves purchase of AutoZone Park, Ballpark Digest)
Territorial exclusivity is real and courts have upheld it. When San Jose sued MLB in 2013 arguing the league's territorial-rights system illegally blocked the Oakland A's from relocating there (because the Giants held exclusive rights to that market), the Ninth Circuit held only the Supreme Court could overturn MLB's antitrust exemption, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal — leaving both the exemption and the territorial block intact. This is a direct, on-point precedent for the closed-franchise dynamic this project already documents for the NBA — see Is the NBA a monopoly?. (CPM Legal)
4. International and historical comparators
Germany's Bundesliga "50+1 rule" is member ownership, not government ownership — a distinction worth getting exactly right, since it's frequently misreported. It requires that a club's registered fan/member association retain majority (50%+1) voting control of the professional football company. A 20-year "grandfather" exception permits Bayer Leverkusen (owned by Bayer AG since 1904, predating the rule) and VfL Wolfsburg (owned by Volkswagen since the club's 1945 founding in a company town) to hold controlling stakes. RB Leipzig's workaround — a nominal members' association with only ~21 voting members, nearly all tied to Red Bull — was flagged by Germany's Federal Cartel Office in 2023 as circumventing the rule's intent. None of this is government ownership; it is enforced by the DFL, a private league body, not the German state. (Bundesliga.com; Wikipedia: 50+1 rule)
Cuba's INDER system is the clearest real example of literal state ownership of a sports league, and stands as a useful (if politically distinct) data point on what full public ownership actually looks like in practice. Created in 1961, INDER eliminated private professional baseball and turned the Cuban National Series into a system of provincial teams that are government property outright — no private ownership, no trades, no commercial sponsorship, with players paid as state employees at wages comparable to teachers rather than market salaries. Soviet-era clubs (Dynamo, CSKA, Spartak) followed a related but distinct model: institutional ownership by specific state organs (the security services, the military, trade unions) rather than direct national-government ownership of a public league. (Wikipedia: Cuban National Series; Wikipedia: CSKA Moscow)
U.S. publicly owned venues leasing to privately owned teams remain the norm, not the exception, at every level: Oriole Park at Camden Yards (Maryland Stadium Authority, which owns and built the site, with over $1.3 billion in public costs documented since 1988 — the "~96% publicly financed" figure that circulates widely traces only to an uncited enthusiast website, and a separate "60%, per Judith Grant Long" attribution did not survive checking its purported source; neither specific percentage should be cited without a primary source), Soldier Field (Chicago Park District), Nationals Park (Events DC, legal name Washington Convention and Sports Authority — the successor entity after the former "DC Sports and Entertainment Commission" merged into it in 2009 and rebranded in 2011; that older name should not be used going forward), and — most recently — Highmark Stadium in Buffalo, where ownership formally transferred from Erie County to New York State on August 3, 2026 as part of the original 2022 $850 million public commitment. That $850M was the largest U.S. sports-stadium public subsidy at the time it was announced, but has since been surpassed: the Tennessee Titans' Nissan Stadium deal (announced April 2023) committed $1.26 billion in public funds, and the Washington Commanders' 2025 RFK Stadium deal committed up to $1.1 billion — so the Bills/Highmark package is now the second-largest, not the largest, NFL stadium subsidy. This is the Moda Center pattern (Section 1), replicated nationally. (Maryland Stadium Authority; Camden Yards Sports Complex, Wikipedia; Chicago Park District, Wikipedia; Events DC, Wikipedia; Erie County: Ownership of New Highmark Stadium Officially Transferred; Tennessee Titans Break NFL Record With $1.26 Billion, Forbes; Washington Commanders Get Initial Approval for RFK Stadium Funding, Sportico)
5. Bottom line and implications for this project's civic-ownership argument
Government ownership of a competitive team's franchise itself — as opposed to its venue — has essentially no precedent inside the U.S. major leagues, and this is not an accident of history; it is actively and explicitly barred by at least one league's bylaws. The NFL's rules bar corporations, nonprofits, and governments alike from holding membership, with Green Bay grandfathered in as the sole exception. The NBA's Constitution (Article 2.5(j)) makes government ownership presumptively disqualifying, waivable only if the Board of Governors finds "a compelling reason to the contrary" — a strong deterrent in practice, though formally a policy default rather than the NFL's categorical bar. No affirmative example of true government ownership of a semi-pro or competitive amateur team surfaced in this research either — what exists at that level is almost always either (a) a government owning the facility while a private or nonprofit entity runs the team (the dominant pattern), or (b) genuinely private amateur/booster-club leagues with no government role at all. The one clean historical exception — Harrisburg's 1995–2007 municipal ownership of its minor-league team — happened at a level far below the majors and was itself eventually sold back to private ownership.
This has a direct implication for this project's civic-league vision: a municipal/intra-state league built as this project envisions cannot assume that "the city just owns the team" is a legally available option inside any existing major or minor-league structure — the NFL bylaw and the NBA Constitution's governmental-transfer bar would have to be treated as targets for reform in their own right, not just the broadcast and labor exemptions already documented in Is the NBA a monopoly?. What is legally available, and has real working precedent, is the community/shareholder nonprofit model — Green Bay and Rochester both show it can run indefinitely once established, though both required a bankruptcy-adjacent crisis to get off the ground, and neither is "government ownership" so much as a structural alternative to any single owner (public or private) at all. A genuinely new intra-state/municipal league — built outside the existing majors' bylaws entirely — would not face this barrier, since it isn't asking permission from the NFL, NBA, or MLB in the first place; the Harrisburg and Green Bay/Rochester templates both become directly usable at that level.
Open items / not yet verified
- Exact NFL Constitution article/section number for the 1960 nonprofit-ownership ban, and for the separate 30%-controlling-owner rule — still not confirmed against a clean primary-text copy as of the 2026-08-11 verification pass. Secondary sources actively conflict (one cites "Rule 3.2(a)," another "Article V, Section 4"/"the Green Bay Rule"), and the two most promising primary-text candidates are scanned PDFs that resisted automated text extraction: onlabor.org copy and a DocumentCloud copy. Someone should open one of these manually before citing a specific section number.
- Whether MLB has any explicit written rule addressing municipal ownership going forward — reconfirmed 2026-08-11 as an absence of evidence, not a confirmed absence; no leaked or litigation-exhibit text of MLB's constitution addressing government ownership specifically could be located. The Harrisburg and pre-2014 Memphis cases suggest it was tolerated under the old PBA-era regime, at minimum.