TEAM HISTORY
The Green Bay Packers are a professional American football team based in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Packers compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the National Football Conference (NFC) North division. It is the third-oldest franchise in the NFL, dating back to 1919, and is the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team based in the United States. Home games have been played at Lambeau Field since 1957. The Packers are the last of the "small town teams" which were common in the NFL during the league's early days of the 1920s and 1930s. Founded in 1919 by Earl "Curly" Lambeau and George Whitney Calhoun, the franchise traces its lineage to other semi-professional teams in Green Bay dating back to 1896. The Acme Packing Company gave its name to the Green Bay Packers. The football team took its name after Curly Lambeau, a shipping clerk for the company, successfully asked the company's owner, Frank Peck, for money for jerseys and use of the company's athletic field in 1919. Between 1919 and 1920, the Packers competed against other semi-pro clubs from around Wisconsin and the Midwest, before joining the American Professional Football Association (APFA), the forerunner of today's NFL, in 1921. In 1933, the Packers began playing part of their home slate in Milwaukee until changes at Lambeau Field in 1995 made it more lucrative to stay in Green Bay full time; Milwaukee is still considered a home media market for the team.
Although Green Bay is by far the smallest major league professional sports market in North America, Forbes ranked the Packers as the world's 27th most valuable sports franchise in 2019, with a value of $2.63 billion. The Packers have won 13 league championships, the most in NFL history, with nine pre-Super Bowl NFL titles and four Super Bowl victories. The Packers won the first two Super Bowls in 1966 and 1967 and were the only NFL team to defeat the American Football League (AFL) prior to the AFL–NFL merger. The Vince Lombardi Trophy is named after the Packers' coach Vince Lombardi, who guided them to their first two Super Bowls. Their two subsequent Super Bowl wins came in 1996 and 2010. Additionally, the Packers have recorded the most wins (804) and the highest win–loss record (.571) in NFL history, including both regular season and playoff games. The Packers are long-standing adversaries of the Chicago Bears, Minnesota Vikings, and Detroit Lions, who today form the NFL's NFC North division (formerly known as the NFC Central Division). They have played over 100 games against each of those teams through history, and have a winning overall record against all of them, a distinction only shared with the Kansas City Chiefs and Dallas Cowboys. The Bears–Packers rivalry is one of the oldest rivalries in U.S. professional sports history, dating back to 1921.
