Lesson 1: Solidarity

In 2011, the Packers were on top of the world: they had just come off an improbable playoff run where they’d had to win every game on the road, they beat an alleged rapist in the Super Bowl, and Aaron Rodgers hadn’t yet introduced himself to a new teammate by asking him if 9/11 was real.

But their home state of Wisconsin wasn’t doing so great. Scott Walker, who was the governor of the state even though his vibe is more “guy who’d cheat on his wife at a real estate convention,” was just beginning his unconstitutional assault on the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers.

A group of current and former Packers chose this moment, as newly minted Super Bowl champs at the top of the American zeitgeist, to stand in solidarity with teachers and nurses, saying:

We know that it is teamwork on and off the field that makes the Packers and Wisconsin great. . . . When workers join together it serves as a check on corporate power and helps ALL workers by raising community standards. . . . These public workers are Wisconsin’s champions every single day and we urge the Governor and the State Legislature to not take away their rights.

Heisman Trophy winner and emotional leader of the team Charles Woodson also spoke out:

It is an honor for me to play for the Super Bowl Champion Green Bay Packers and be a part of the Green Bay and Wisconsin communities. I am also honored as a member of the NFL Players Association to stand together with working families of Wisconsin and organized labor in their fight against this attempt to hurt them by targeting unions.

Lesson 2: Public Ownership

Many teams in major American professional sports get publicly owned, like the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl. But only the Green Bay Packers are publicly owned.

They operate as a nonprofit by selling shares to fans on terms that would make a Wall Street executive kill himself: no dividends; no reselling of stocks; they only sell every ten to twenty years when they want to renovate the field or otherwise put more money into the institution itself; and no single person can own more than 5 percent of the team. And when they say nonprofit, they mean it. There is no majority shareholder hoarding wealth —  no gods, no owners.

Every single other team is owned by some idiot who knocked up a Walmart heiress or by a tech billionaire who can’t stop throwing drinks in people’s faces like a Vanderpump bit player, and if you’re lucky enough to have an owner who dies or has to resign because he calls Joe Biden the N-word, your entire fandom is at the whim of a faildaughter who needs to prove herself to daddy’s ghost by firing people at random.

Every NFL fan basically lives as a subject under Habsburg rule: I sure hope the next guy has all the chromosomes where they’re supposed to be! Except for Packers fans, who actually have a say in who runs the team. Now granted, it’s a small say, but if the team president or CEO spectacularly screwed up to the point where we needed to get rid of him, we wouldn’t have to fly a plane over the stadium begging him to do the right thing — we could just organize to vote him out!

This also expresses itself on the field, which leads us to the Packers’ third socialist teaching. . . .

Lesson 3: A Planned Economy

The NFL quarterback is the single most valuable and important position in professional sports. To put it into leftist terms for you nerds, they must have the brains of Karl Marx, the might of Vladimir Lenin, the ruthless cunning of Joseph Stalin, and the ability to evade attackers for as long as possible of Leon Trotsky. Forget good; finding an even adequate starting quarterback is harder than finding an ice pick in a haystack.

It makes teams and, more specifically, their owners lose their minds. If you’re the general manager who picks the QB or the coach who trains the QB, and that QB sucks through no fault of your own? Sorry! Even if you’re great at your job, your owner will fire you because he is addicted to scoring a good quarterback.

To put it in terms we can all relate to: my dad was so addicted to sports betting that he stole my bar mitzvah money to pay off gambling debts (true). This type of robbing Peter to pay Paul behavior destroys teams (and families). Because if the owner is willing to blow up the whole thing, then the people in charge of the roster and the coaching operate out of fear. Everything becomes about short-term gains over long-term vision. Another way to look at it is mortgage-backed securities versus something like municipal bonds. One of these things can make you a ton of money right away, but it can also tank the entire economy.

The Packers have the luxury of time. There is no owner breathing down anyone’s neck, so they can be methodical when it comes to team building and structure. Famously the Packers have only had three starting quarterbacks since the end of the Cold War. Why? Because they have time and a long-as-hell leash. Both Aaron Rodgers and Jordan Love were deeply unpopular draft picks who also happened to be incredible values at the spots where they were drafted. Instead of being chained to the present, the Packs’ braintrust saw that these dudes would be needed in a few years to become true-blue franchise quarterbacks.

Most teams with traditional owners would have pressured the general manager to draft someone that would help them Win Now, or forced the coach to start the rookie way too early. After all, these are for-profit ventures; we need butts in seats, and I need to make some f-ing mon-ey. But the Packers’ sustainable model, which owes 100 percent to the fact that they’re publicly owned, lets them do the right thing for the present and the future.

The Green Bay Packers have been my favorite team for as long as I can remember, and ultimately things like watching Jordan Love uncork a hero ball are why, not some spot-the-Illuminati-symbol-but-for-socialism thing. But there are some real lessons here on how a professional sports team, possibly one of the least human groups of humans, can make you feel involved while putting a better product on the field. And those lessons are surprisingly similar to the ones we’re trying to instill in our communities. Go Pack Go.