Green Bay Packers on the clock - Photo by Yahoo Sports
GREEN BAY, WI (WSAU) – The city of Green Bay has officially been awarded the 2025 NFL Draft.
The announcement was made today at the NFL Spring League Meeting in Minneapolis and the event will be held ‘inside and around iconic Lambeau Field and Titletown.’
The week-long event will feature a range of activities, such as the well-known “NFL Draft Experience,” which allows fans of every team to see what it would be like to be selected by their favorite team.
The NFL has announced that the 2025 NFL Draft will be in Green Bay. pic.twitter.com/MY19ieXzkJ
— Ian Rapoport (@RapSheet) May 22, 2023
Up until 2014, the draft was usually held somewhere in New York, most notably at Radio City Music Hall from 2006 to 2014. Since then, the event has gone on the road with the NFL essentially treating the draft and its economic impact as a second “Super Bowl,” allowing cold-weather or smaller markets that are traditionally left out of the rotation for the league’s championship game to host a traveling event that brings hundreds of thousands of fans in for multiple days.
Cities including Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Nashville, and Kansas City have hosted some of the most recent drafts. Detroit will host the event in 2024, having beat out an application from the Packers for the honor.
Green Bay had applied to host the event each year since 2022, citing improvements to the Titletown district and the mystique of Lambeau Field. Details around the event are still being worked out, but it is expected that several venues around the stadium will be utilized.
This will be the second draft ever held in Wisconsin and the first in the modern, or Super Bowl, era. The 1940 NFL Draft was held at the Schroeder Hotel in Milwaukee. Back then there were only 10 teams in the NFL, and the draft was 22 rounds.
League estimates show some 600,000 people attended all three days of the 2019 Draft in Nashville, but that could double or triple-count those who attended multiple days of the three-day event. Economic impact figures show the Dallas event in 2018 generated well over $125 million for the area including $74 million in direct spending.
It’s expected that most of Green Bay’s available hotel rooms will need to be reserved for league officials and top prospects who will attend the event. Meaning hotels from as far away as the Fox Valley, Milwaukee, and Wausau will be filled with fans attending the event.
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