I remember many years ago Bob Harlan expressed the goal of growing the team’s reserve fund to the size of its annual expenses. It’s easy to take the Packers’ financial success for granted today but that wasn’t always the case - even after Harlan took over and Wolf arrived. Even after winning the title in Super Bowl XXXI in January of 1997, the Packers suffered a net operating loss of more than $400K in fiscal year 1999. So Harlan’s goal was anything but a sure thing before the Lambeau renovation – in 2001 Packers cash reserve was less than $41M and expected to continue to drop before the economic benefits of the renovations had effect.
Fast forward to today and look where the organization is: The linked article states the corporate reserve fund has grown to $284M. That’s shy of the total expenses for the last fiscal year of $298.5M but of course those expenses included the upfront money needed to extend Rodgers and Matthews. A "modest" and mandated increase of the previous year’s expenses of about $254M is more likely. Of course depreciation and other factors figure into these numbers. My point is in addition to how well our team has performed on the field since Harlan was promoted and Wolf hired, the front office has also shown vision in not being complacent regarding increasing revenues going forward. Big kudos to Harlan for that and to Murphy who is continuing along those same lines.
The other item of interest after the growth and size of the reserve fund IMO was the increase in the money from the TV contracts and licensing deals, which increased $7.8 M to $187.7M per team (as noted in Wilde’s column on Packers finances). It’s another in a long line of examples of the wisdom of the league’s revenue sharing which dates back to Pete Rozelle (who I believe copied the idea from the AFL).
