When a team doesn’t owns its own stadium, any effort to upgrade the venue can become a game of “mother may I?”
In Green Bay, the Packers want the local stadium district to authorize payment of $3 million toward the building of a third locker room, at an estimated cost of $5 million.
Via the Green Bay Press Gazette, the Green Bay/Brown County Professional Football Stadium District has tabled the issue until June.
By a vote of 6-1, the stadium district decided to gather more information on the issue, including whether and to what extent other teams in the NFL have a third locker room in their stadiums.
The team believe a third locker room will help attract college football games and professional soccer matches, since the Packers don’t surrender their locker room when such events happen. In the past, the team converted the stadium gym to a temporary locker room. That won’t be an option moving forward (it’s not clear why), requiring the team to build a temporary locker room outside the stadium.
The issue comes at a time when talks on an extension of the team’s lease recently sputtered after the team made a proposal.
The Packers don’t have a lot of leverage here, since they can’t leave town and there’s no other NFL-caliber venue in the area. Their only alternative would be to build their own stadium in Green Bay.
Which they could easily do, since the profits don’t dump into one person’s pockets and/or yacht maintenance fund.
That might be the way to go, eventually. If nothing else, it would allow the team to do whatever it wants at the facility without having to seek permission from anyone.