History of the Green Bay Packers

The Green Bay Packers are a professional American football team that has played since 1919 and played professionally in the National Football League since 1921.

The Green Bay Packers were founded on August 11, 1919 by Curly Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun. Lambeau solicited funds for uniforms from his employer, the Indian Packing Company. He was given $500 for uniforms and equipment.

The 1919 Green Bay Packers season was their first season of competitive football. The club was formed by Curly Lambeau and George Calhoun with help from the Indian Packing Company. The club played against other teams in Wisconsin and Michigan and ended the season with a 10-1 record, losing only to the Beloit Fairies.

The team became the Acme Packers – under the ownership of the Clair brothers – and a professional franchise when they joined the newly formed American Professional Football Association on August 27, 1921. However, the franchise was revoked by the league at the end of the season when the Packers were revealed to have used college players in a game. As it turned out, the man who told the league of this was George Halas of the Chicago Staleys, who changed their name to the Bears the following year. This incident signaled the start of the infamous Packers-Bears rivalry. Lambeau appealed to the league and they allowed the franchise to be reinstated, though Lambeau had to pay the league entry fee of $50 to do so. Further troubles threatened to add more debt to the team, but local businessmen, known as the "Hungry Five," got behind the team and formed the Green Bay Football Corporation in 1923, which continues to run the franchise to this day.

The Packers are now the only publicly owned company with a board of directors in American professional sports (although other teams, such as the Atlanta Braves [Liberty Media, previously Time Warner], New York Rangers & New York Knicks [Cablevision], the Carolina Hurricanes [Compuware], the Seattle Mariners [Nintendo of America], and the Toronto Blue Jays [Rogers Communications] are directly owned by publicly traded companies). Typically, a team is owned by one person, partnership, or corporate entity; thus, a "team owner." It has been speculated that this is one of the reasons the Green Bay Packers have never been moved from the city of Green Bay, a city of only 104,057 people in the 2010 census.

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