2025 NFL Draft Excitement Building in Green Bay

NEW ORLEANS — With its faux facade of brick, green and yellow and white accents around the booth and large “Lambeau Field” lettering, Discover Green Bay and its hometown Packers spent the days leading to Super Bowl LIX promoting the next major NFL event, the draft that starts April 24.

And if the booth wasn’t enough to make people stop and chat and learn more about what the stakeholders have in mind for this spring, there was the lure of some warm brats with mustard and sauerkraut for lunch.

“We look at this as not just these three days, but how are we leveraging this opportunity to showcase Green Bay as a sports travel destination for the Green Bay Packers and beyond,” said Nick Meissner, vice president of digital marketing and communications at Discover Green Bay. “The draft is a great opportunity to be able to show what our city has to offer.”

The planning and preparation have been ongoing for several years in Green Bay. While the city was officially awarded the 2025 draft in May 2023, the bid and ideas process has been in motion since the NFL first took the draft on the road. When watching the community respond to the event in 2015 in Chicago, the Packers and Discover Green Bay became immediately interested in hosting.

It has been a bit of legend in the Green Bay hospitality industry that Discover Green Bay CEO Brad Toll pointed out that Radio City Music Hall could host 8,000 people and the local Resch Center had a 10,000-seat capacity. But it was the Packers’ 100th season celebration a few years back that caught the NFL’s attention, said Aaron Popkey, director of public affairs for the Packers.

“The league came out and saw that on the Lambeau Field campus,” he said. “All those things I think got the league thinking, OK, Green Bay can do this. And then at some point they invited us to put in an official bid. Then it got serious and that’s when we’re like, this is getting serious. So that was exciting.”

Green Bay will be the smallest city to host an NFL Draft as the metro area includes about 320,000 people. As Meissner notes, the number of Packers games means the city knows how to handle an influx of people; a difference will be the larger amount of ingress and egress but “it’s not a new thing for us to host these big events,” Meissner said. “For some reason, this one seems to rise up and bring questions up about it, even though this is what we do in Green Bay. We are a big event city.”

For Discover Green Bay, the ability to host the draft goes beyond the draft. Meissner says the bureau wants to show off its culinary scene, arts and culture and history going back to the indigenous population and First Nations. The chance to show off its destination internationally also gives Discover Green Bay another opportunity to educate locals as to its purpose.

“The general public in any U.S. city may not know what a convention and visitors bureau is,” Meissner said. “It’s been really cool to leverage the draft and the attention that that brings to say, Hey, this is what a CVB does. This is what a destination marketing organization does. It’s not just the pretty commercials. It’s on the ground, working with event planners to make sure our city is seen as a destination for all sorts of events that’ll put heads in beds and expose people to what our community has to offer.”

The draft will mostly be on the Lambeau Field and Titletown campus, with a variety of venues to be utilized within close proximity to the stadium. The festivities will feature the NFL Draft Experience including exhibits, player appearances, sponsor experiences, youth-focused activities and opportunities for fans of all ages to test their skills. There’s also the Packers Heritage Trail that tells the story of the franchise and, by extension, the history of the NFL.

“It is a celebration of all 32 clubs in the offseason and it’s become the biggest offseason event for the NFL,” said Popkey, who expects Green Bay to get fans driving in from several markets including Minneapolis, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis and more.

One of Popkey’s favorite things being part of the franchise is going around Lambeau Field on a Friday afternoon during the season and seeing people from around the Midwest and beyond who are visiting for the first time. The draft could take that to another level and turn the Lambeau parking lots into a variety of license plates from the United States.

“To see the energy around the whole stadium, I think will be something to behold,” Popkey said. “I’ve been to four other drafts and the energy there is great.”

“We can host anything, but we definitely don’t want to lose that hospitality that comes with being a mid-market and that’s not going to change,” Meissner added. “Our personality is we’re big enough to do big stuff, small enough to care.”