Packers

Green Bay is a small city, small enough that the pro football club headquartered there stands as an anomaly in its league — every other franchise plays in a metropolis, and this one plays in a city that could fit inside a neighbourhood of most of its rivals. A public stock sale kept it running, and the structure that resulted has never been undone: over 537,000 shareholders hold the club today, the shares pay no dividend and cannot be resold for profit, and no single owner has ever controlled it. It remains the only club of its kind in American professional sport.

Earl "Curly" Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun founded the team on August 11, 1919. Vince Lombardi took charge in 1959 and built the era the club is still measured against, five NFL Championships in seven seasons and wins in the first two Super Bowls ever played; the trophy awarded to the league's champion now carries his name. Bart Starr quarterbacked those teams and was named Most Valuable Player in both of those Super Bowls. Decades later Aaron Rodgers took the same position and the same MVP honour in Super Bowl XLV.

Thirteen league championships sit in the club's history, more than any other team in the league has managed. The coldest of them came on December 31, 1967, when Green Bay beat the Dallas Cowboys 21–17 in temperatures of -13°F, a game still known as the Ice Bowl. The rivalry with the Chicago Bears runs back to 1921 and remains the oldest continuous matchup in the league.

The club still plays at Lambeau Field, built to hold 81,441, in the same city that bought its way out of ruin a century ago.