Packers, WNBA, and NASCAR: Sports Business Roundup

The NFL has produced 48 defunct franchises since the 1920s. The Canton Bulldogs, the Oorang Indians — a team that included Jim Thorpe and was composed entirely of Native American players — the Tonawanda Kardex. These were not fringe curiosities. They were professional football teams that simply could not sustain themselves. SBJ's Austin Karp surfaced that fact from a visit to the Pro Football Hall of Fame this week, and it has more utility as a business framework than it does as trivia: the history of American professional sports is mostly a graveyard, and the survivors are survivors for specific, structural reasons.

Karp's broader morning roundup for Monday, July 27th carried that same undercurrent — stories about which entities are gaining structural leverage and which are watching it accumulate in someone else's hands.

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The Packers' ATM Problem

The most substantive item concerns the Green Bay Packers, whose publicly released financials offer the only annual window into the internal economics of a single NFL franchise — and whose unusual ownership structure is increasingly read by team leadership as a competitive liability.

The league distributed roughly $14.5 billion to its member clubs this past season, working out to just over $450 million per team, up approximately 5% year-over-year. Embedded in that figure is value flowing from the league's 10% stake in ESPN, which Karp reports was recorded in the Packers' books at around $134 million in a non-operating segment. Packers president and CEO Ed Policy declined to offer further detail on the mechanics of that specific arrangement — which, given the opacity surrounding the ESPN deal across the league generally, is itself worth noting.

What Policy did address directly was the private equity gap. Every other NFL franchise now has access to institutional capital through PE investment structures. Green Bay, as a community-owned team operating under a nonprofit model, does not. Policy put it plainly: "It's like other teams have access to this ATM machine that we just don't have."

That framing deserves some unpacking. Private equity in sports is not simply a liquidity event — it typically arrives with operational expertise, balance sheet flexibility, and the capacity to fund stadium modernization or ancillary development without requiring public debt issuance or fan stock sales. The Packers, by contrast, must generate non-football revenue to fill that gap. The team's apparent response: open Lambeau Field more aggressively to concerts and college football (Notre Dame-Wisconsin is on the calendar next month), explore commercial sponsorship of assets in and around the venue, and raise ticket prices — with Policy suggesting the team would remain around mid-pack on that metric even after increases.

Naming rights for Lambeau itself appear off the table for now. That is, charitably, the correct call from a brand management standpoint. It would also represent the loudest possible acknowledgment that the economic model is straining.

The underlying tension is real. The Packers' community ownership structure is what makes them the Packers — the franchise identity is inseparable from it. But that same structure was designed for a sports economy that no longer exists. What Policy is navigating is not simply a capital problem; it is a question of whether a governance model built in the mid-20th century can remain competitive in an era of institutional investment without ceasing to be what it is.

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Engelbert's Standing in the W

The WNBA's All-Star weekend in Chicago produced a legitimate milestone: 19,783 fans at United Center for the All-Star Game, eclipsing the previous record set in Washington in 2007. That number belongs in the ledger of real league growth, and the announcement of a dedicated replay center arriving in 2027 speaks to the kind of infrastructure investment the league has historically deferred.

What the weekend also produced, with considerably less polish, was a public reckoning with Commissioner Cathy Engelbert's standing among the players she governs.

Four-time MVP A'ja Wilson offered the clearest signal, telling reporters that her only relationship with Engelbert is when she is handed awards. Caitlin Clark, when asked about her relationship with league leadership, pivoted to her rapport with NBA Commissioner Adam Silver — not Engelbert — and noted that within the WNBA, she mostly communicates with player leadership directly.

Karp observed that you simply do not hear this register of commentary from NBA players about Silver, or about David Stern before him. That is not a small distinction. Commissioner authority in professional sports leagues is substantially a function of player legitimacy — whether players believe the person across the table is operating in the framework's shared interest. What Wilson and Clark described is a relationship that has collapsed into ceremony and formality.

Engelbert herself acknowledged in Chicago that communication with players needs to improve. She also avoided a direct answer when asked about her future past the 2026 season — which Adam Silver had already flagged as an open question following the contentious CBA negotiations that saved the season. Whether she remains in the role is now a governance story as much as a personnel one.

The irony is that the league's business fundamentals are measurably better than they were when Engelbert took office. Attendance records, broadcast visibility, and commercial investment have all moved in the right direction. If the person who presided over that growth cannot maintain working trust with the players producing it, that is a structural problem — not an interpersonal one.

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Quick Hits

Michigan / Warde Manuel: Athletic director Warde Manuel will receive a lump-sum buyout exceeding $7 million from the Wolverines, along with a two-year non-compete clause applicable to any Big Ten institution. Michigan will also cover $82,000 in attorney's fees. Manuel remains technically employed through December 31st, at which point he voluntarily resigns. The standard departing-AD benefits apply — tickets, and what Karp notes are "naturally golf privileges." The non-compete architecture is worth watching as the Big Ten's footprint has expanded to the point where restricting a departing administrator from employment within the conference has genuine geographic and economic weight.

NASCAR Clash / Daytona: The Clash, NASCAR's season-opening exhibition race, is returning to Daytona in 2027 after a six-year absence from the track, according to sourced reporting from The Athletic. The race had spent three years at LA Memorial Coliseum and the past two at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem. The Athletic's sourcing also indicates the race is slated for the day before the Super Bowl — a scheduling placement that puts it in direct competition for casual sports attention in one of the highest-traffic media windows of the year. Whether that is shrewd positioning or noise-floor risk depends entirely on execution and broadcast placement.

Cooperstown: The Baseball Hall of Fame induction ceremony drew a large crowd to Cooperstown for the class of Jeff Kent, Carlos Beltrán, and Andruw Jones — 57 current Hall of Famers gathered on stage, the largest such assembly on record, according to reporting from The Athletic. The class itself was among the more narratively layered in recent memory: Kent's enshrinement closed a lengthy debate that hinged as much on his defensive reputation and clubhouse profile as his offensive production; Beltrán arrived with the Houston sign-stealing cloud still on the record, having waited through multiple ballot cycles while writers processed what his Astros tenure meant for his legacy; Jones's career arc — all-world defense, a peak that came and went faster than voters could process it — made him a useful stress test for how the electorate weights peak versus longevity. The Ford C. Frick Award went to broadcaster Joe Buck alongside his father Jack, making them the first father-son recipients in the award's history.

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Sports leagues are, at their core, governance structures dressed in uniforms. The weekend's collection of stories — a publicly-owned franchise watching private capital transform its competitors, a commissioner whose legitimacy is fraying at the player level, a hall of fame village still under construction — all trace back to the same question: who holds the structural leverage, and what happens when the answer changes? Forty-eight NFL teams found out the hard way that survival is never guaranteed. The franchises and institutions operating today are the ones that adapted to the capital conditions of their era. The question Packers president Ed Policy is asking out loud is whether Green Bay can do it again without becoming something else entirely.

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— Marcus Tate, Sports Desk Editor