PRIOR to this weekend, London has never had the pleasure of hosting the Green Bay Packers as part of the National Football League’s (NFL) international series.

This team, with its unique ownership structure combined with a history of success and its relatively unusual location, is not like the others.

The Packers are the only team in American football’s juggernaut of a league yet to make an appearance at any of its international roadshow games in London or Mexico, where they have so far been held.

This means one of the most successful franchises in NFL history has never experienced a London game, and despite hosting every other team, London will never have encountered one like Green Bay.

The franchise is owned by Green Bay Packers, Inc and is the only publicly owned nonprofit organisation in the league. The nonprofit corporation consists of hundreds of thousands of shareholders who are invested in a community project, not a profit-making one, at the highest level of sport.

The team’s history means it is still able to exist in such a manner thanks to a grandfather clause. Ownership rules put in place since stipulate that a controlling owner in an NFL franchise must hold at least 30 per cent of shares, and there are limits on the number of owners a team can have.

Rules around the 30 per cent minimum have been relaxed recently to allow existing family ownership of clubs to continue, but regardless of any leeway given in other areas, another team being owned publicly by a large community of owners, as Green Bay are, would not be permitted, unless there was some kind of radical shake-up of the entire sporting and political landscape in the country.

“Green Bay Packers Inc has been a publicly owned, nonprofit corporation since August 18, 1923, when original articles of incorporation were filed with Wisconsin’s secretary of state,” The Packers website proudly states.

“One of the more remarkable business stories in American history, the Green Bay Packers [organisation] has been kept viable by its shareholders — its unselfish fans. 

“Even more incredible, the Packers have survived and thrived during the current era, permeated by free agency and the NFL salary cap.”

In the early days of the NFL, there were numerous teams based in smaller towns and cities in the north-east of the United States. These included teams in Toledo, Ohio; Muncie, Indiana; Rock Island, Illinois; Racine, Wisconsin; and Rochester, New York.

Green Bay, Wisconsin, located north of Milwaukee at the bottom of a Lake Michigan bay of the same name, are the only such team — dubbed the “small town teams” — remaining from the league’s formative days.

Teams from bigger cities such as New York, Washington DC, and Chicago also remain from that era, and the Packers will play one of those, the New York Giants, at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on Sunday.

The Packers haven’t won a Superbowl since 2010, and the Giants last came in 2011, but these two are still among the most successful teams in the history of the league.

Including pre-Superbowl years (pre-1966), Green Bay are the most successful NFL team with 13 championships, while the New York Giants are third with eight, just behind the Chicago Bears’ nine.

The Packers won the first two Superbowls in 1966 and 1967, and only four teams have won more than their total of four. In the history of the NFL, no team has a better overall win percentage. Not only do the Packers do the sport differently, they often do it better.