Green Bay to host NFL draft in 2025 as northern tour continues

MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The NFL draft will be in Green Bay in 2025.

The league announced the 2025 draft’s location on Monday during its spring meetings. The draft and related activities will take place inside and around Lambeau Field and Titletown, the collection of shops and restaurants surrounding the stadium. With an expected 250,000 visitors, the draft will be the largest event ever held in Green Bay, which has a population of 107,000.

“We’re the smallest market in the National Football League by a wide margin, but we’re a big community,” said Ed Policy, chief operating officer and general counsel for the Packers. “I think it’s very fair to say that no other community on the planet has as close of a nexus to the past, present and future of the game of football than Green Bay.”

Next year’s draft will take place from April 25-27 in Detroit. After being held at various New York locations from 1965-2014, the draft has made stops in Chicago (2015-16), Philadelphia (2017), Dallas (2018), Nashville (2019), Las Vegas (2022) and Kansas City (2023).

More than 2.2 million people have attended draft festivities since 2015. This year’s draft brought more than 312,000 fans to Kansas City.

Now it’s preparing to head to the league’s smallest market. The Packers first applied to host in 2016, and the NFL pushed them to answer questions about hotel space and transportation infrastructure.

“The beauty as you’ve seen in the draft is that there’s not a real barrier to hosting it,” said Peter O’Reilly, the NFL’s executive vice president for major events. “We can work through weather. If it can be in Green Bay — no offense, Ed — we can be anywhere.”