NFL Draft campus in Green Bay reaches capacity and admission is paused, April 24, 2025. PC: Fox 11 Online
GREEN BAY (WTAQ-WLUK) — Attendance for the 2025 NFL Draft in Green Bay was 2.5 times more than anticipated, totaling over 600,000 guests.
Despite being the NFL’s smallest market, Titletown showed up in a big way.
Draft organizers repeatedly projected 240,000 people would attend throughout the three-day event.
The NFL confirmed the official attendance Thursday was 205,000 people. According to the Packers, Friday’s attendance was 175,000 and Saturday’s was 220,000.
That’s a grand total of 600,000.
It ties Nashville, where the draft was held in 2019, for second place on the list of highest draft attendance. Detroit in 2024 is still unbeaten at 775,000.
“I apologize to the entire community. I got it completely wrong,” said Jon Barker, the NFL’s global head of events, at a news conference Saturday morning. “I thought 250,000 people would come to this draft over three days, and you’ve completely blown that number out the door.”
“Got to give Mark [Murphy] a lot of props,” said Packers head coach Matt LaFleur of the team’s president/CEO. “I thought as far as the operation, I can’t imagine any NFL draft being better than the one we hosted here. What a great experience, some really cool moments… It was pretty epic.”
Packers general manager Brian Gutekunst echoed those sentiments.
“What an atmosphere, having the draft here. There’s just so many cool things that happened that quite frankly, I didn’t expect. I thought it might be just a nuisance, but it was such a cool environment, such a cool thing, and just a lot of thanks and gratitude to Mark for having the vision to bring that here. I think that was something that we’ll never forget.”
To get accurate attendance numbers, the NFL employs camera systems at all of its entry points, which count people as they walk through the gates.
Keep in mind, however, that if one person enters the draft footprint on each of the three days of the event, that counts as three people.
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