With the 2025 NFL Draft coming to Green Bay this month, residents of the area said they are preparing for the mass amount of people coming to the city or getting ready to attend the event themselves.

The annual three-day draft takes place between April 24 and 26 and is the second time Wisconsin is hosting, with the first happening in 1940 in Milwaukee.

Last year, Detroit broke the record with over 700,000 people attending the draft over the three days. Just like last year, the draft will be free to attend in terms of admission to gather more people to the event.

Being the NFL’s smallest market in terms of population, businesses and cities around the area have been preparing for over a year for the influx of visitors to Titletown. 

With parking already being a common issue on Packer gamedays with the area’s lack of parking lots, transportation for this event is a topic of discussion among many for those attending.

Logan Seymour, a student at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, said he and his friends plan on using an Uber to get to the draft due to the traffic and limited parking spaces in the area.

“I’ve heard it’s going to be a mess to find parking and that there’s going to be a lot of people parking in yards just like they do for Packer games,” Seymour said, referring to locals renting out space on their properties for people to park for big events. “A lot of people I talked to … are just planning on Ubering there and paying [those] fees instead of dealing with the stress of parking.”

Seymour said he noticed Green Bay and surrounding areas have been building a lot of hotels recently and that the event will be huge for the area economically with the number of people coming in.

“Some residents are going to be upset just because there’s going to be so much foot traffic, but overall it will be great for the city,” he said. “The hotels are going to be booked, the restaurants and bars are going to be packed all week and people are going to be shopping around the area.”

One resident of Green Bay who also attends UWO, Grant Burg, said that he has many friends and family attending the draft and that they needed to plan accordingly for the number of people the event will bring.

“They have been preparing by trying to find parking for the draft and planning what time they will have to leave to make it on time,” Burg said. “I don’t think it will be chaotic during the draft specifically but I do think the traffic situation will be the biggest issue.”

Event workers like Kenny Satori, who is working security for the draft to fundraise for the UWO football team, also find themselves not knowing exactly what their plan for transportation is.

“I honestly have no idea where we are going to park, honestly we haven’t been preparing at all,” Satori said. “I know for Packer games it’s very difficult to find a spot to park, so I think it will be that but 10 times worse. With parking for a normal game, Lambeau can only hold 80,000 [people] so it will definitely be interesting to see how it’s all handled.”

Satori, who lives 15 minutes away from Green Bay in Denmark, said the area has been preparing for this event for years by adding apartment buildings and hotels, knowing gatherings like this only happen so often.

“It’s hard not to notice,” he said. “Depending on how it goes, this might be the only time [the draft] is ever in Green Bay so everybody wants to see it here.”

Satori said he hopes this event goes well economically for the city and that he hopes he can see another draft in Wisconsin during his lifetime, but realistically it depends on how things go down in April.

“I think it will definitely be chaotic, I don’t think there’s any way around that,” he said. “When you get a smaller city like Green Bay to hold three or four times its population it could be very difficult, especially for the locals that have never seen anything like this before.”

Satori said that working security and being able to attend the NFL Draft will be the coolest job he’s ever done and that no matter how many people show up, his mind will be blown. 

“[The draft] will mean nothing but good things for Green Bay,” he said. “But as the saying goes, you get out what you put in, so we’ll see how Green Bay and the Packers handle this [in] April.”