The Green Bay Packers fear that the financial boom sweeping the National Football League could widen the gap between franchises with billionaire ownership and those without, with team executives warning that even the league’s celebrated parity model has limits.

In an interview with Sports Business Journal, Packers president and CEO Ed Policy acknowledged that the franchise’s unique structure — being the NFL’s only publicly owned, nonprofit team — leaves it exposed as spending escalates across the league. While NFL rules and revenue sharing have long been designed to protect small-market teams such as Green Bay, Policy suggested that the influx of private capital and soaring franchise valuations are beginning to test that balance.

The core issue is simple: most NFL teams are backed by extraordinarily wealthy ownership groups capable of injecting cash into facilities, staff and infrastructure. The Packers, by contrast, cannot raise capital in the same way. Their occasional public stock offerings are largely symbolic and confer no real equity, while the franchise lacks the kind of billionaire benefactor common elsewhere in the league.

Policy noted that the Packers maintain a reserve fund exceeding $600m, but even that figure pales in comparison to what rival franchises can access. “Any other team, with deep-pocketed owners… could sell less than 10 percent of their team… and raise a heck of a lot more than that,” he said, highlighting how easily wealthier owners can generate new capital without relinquishing control.

For Green Bay, the consequences are most apparent in the areas that fall outside the NFL’s carefully constructed salary-cap system. Policy openly acknowledged that the cap remains the great equaliser, describing it as fundamental to the franchise’s survival, emphasising that without it ‘there would be no Green Bay Packers’.

Yet the cap only governs player wages. Spending on coaching staffs, analytics departments, sports science programmes, facilities and other football operations is effectively unlimited, and those costs have risen sharply in recent years. Teams with wealthy owners can invest aggressively in those areas, potentially gaining competitive advantages that the cap cannot regulate.

That reality leaves Green Bay walking a financial tightrope. While the franchise remains one of the league’s most popular brands and consistently sells out Lambeau Field, Policy warned that falling behind economically would be difficult to reverse. In order to address the issue, he intimated that the club would have to embrace more non-football events and soccer matches at Lambeau, as well as potential increases in ticket prices.