This Sunday’s throwback uniforms – based on those worn by the 1923 Green Bay Packers – weren’t a random choice by the NFL’s only publicly-owned team. In fact, 1923 might have been the most important year in the franchise’s history.

Why? It wasn’t because the team went 7-2-1 in just its fourth season. And it wasn’t that it was the Packers’ first season playing at its new home, Bellevue Park, either. Nor was it because it’s the first time the Chicago Bears traveled to Green Bay for a game (the Packers lost, 3-0). 

Nope. It’s an important choice because 1923 is the year in which the Packers originally became the publicly-owned team we know today.

In 1922, the Packers were booted from the NFL – then known as the American Professional Football Association – over a cheating scandal involving college ringers playing in a non-league game against Racine. The Packers naturally protested the league’s decision, and due to plenty of legwork by team founder Earl “Curly” Lambeau, the team was reinstated for the 1923 season in the newly-named National Football League.

Had Lambeau’s efforts been unsuccessful, there’s little chance the team would have existed much longer. Ultimately, the NFL board agreed that the Packers were good for professional football. 

Around that time, Acme Packing Company, which had become the team’s sponsor of sorts, had found itself in bankruptcy, and there was reportedly brief consideration on the company’s part of moving the club to Chicago. In short, things in Green Bay were on some slippery turf, in football terms.

But, thankfully, this time of difficulty was not to last. 

Can't hear you over all this aura pic.twitter.com/F6dL9M1k01

— Green Bay Packers Football Club (@packers) October 29, 2025

With the team accepted back into what by then had become the National Football League under the name the Green Bay Packers Football Club, and Acme finally now out of the picture, it was time to focus on the franchise’s finances, which were bleak. 

The team essentially had been losing money hand over fist. A booster club fundraiser was derailed by inclement weather, so in stepped Press-Gazette owner Andrew Turnbull, who spearheaded a drive to change the club’s ownership structure through the creation of the Green Bay Packer Football Corporation. 

This shift made the club a publicly-owned property, the first – and still only – of its kind in professional sports. 

An initial stock offering starting at $5 per shares was sold across the city, and the team raised more than $5,500, selling more than 1,100 shares. The Packers never had to deal with a sole owner as a result, which ensured the team would remain where it started, so long as the city supported it. 

“There’s no way the Packers would have survived under private ownership,” Packers Historian Cliff Christl told me in a recent interview. “I’d say they would have been forced to move to Milwaukee – that’s the most likely scenario that the league would have forced.” 

In that case, a private owner would have been brought in for the franchise, and it’s unlikely the team would even be recognizable today. Further stock issuances in 1935 and 1950 were undertaken to help the team survive further financial woes, which kept the Packers moving forward. Modern stock offerings in 1997, 2011 and 2021 were issued to help fund improvements to Lambeau Field.

Today there are well over 5 million honorary stockholders of the Green Bay Packers. But it’s thanks in large part to those early Packers supporters, some of the original fans to ever Carry the G, that the team still exists.

“I would call it a miracle – and not a minor miracle” that the Packers still exist in Green Bay, by far the smallest NFL market, Christl said. “It’s beyond belief almost when you look back at all the obstacles they faced, all the crises they were involved in. They not only survived, but have been the most successful franchise.”

So, when you pull on that throwback jersey on Sunday, give a little nod to those first-ever Packers stockholders.