Why threaten retirement at all? If he doesn’t retire and reports to camp, he’s just being petty. If he doesn’t report to camp and does not retire, he WILL get fined unless the Packers forgive him. If he DOES retire then comes back next year, he loses respect from the fans and his teammates since they also lose a year. The Packers, with or without his input, put together a good team that are contenders. I’m not sure what more he wants. He is coming off worse every day.
Unless the rules were changed in the last CBA, IIRC the retirement process involves the following:
A player has to officially file retirement papers with the league, which would force the player and the team to settle up. Unless the Packers are willing to forgive and forget (unlikely), Rodgers would be obligated to repay GB any signing bonus money he received for years he did not play. In this case, I believe that would be $23 million. GB would get some cap relief for this year (at a minimum, the salary he was due this year plus whatever they extracted from him that was allocated for his signing bonus for this year). There are a lot of outcomes to this, and they could either save a lot or eat a lot depending upon how things went. If there ended up being a grievance and a determination made down the road, GB might not get salary cap relief until next year.
I don't remember how long a player has to stay retired before being allowed to unretire. However, if a retired player files to be reinstated with the league office, his original team retains his rights and his contract picks up where it ended. I believe that he would be due his signing bonus money all over again.
But the tricky part for the Packers is they would have 24 hours (or one business day from when the league acknowledged Rodgers desire to return) to add Rodgers to the active roster . . . and they couldn't go over the salary cap. So if they went out and used the money from Rodgers on other players and had no salary cap space to activate him, they would have to release him (or trade him).
This situation came up when Rob Gronkowski wanted to unretire and play with TB. Gronk didn't want to go back to NE, so he basically forced a trade to TB (as NE would have needed $10+ million in available salary cap space).
Like I said, that's how the process was set up as of a few years ago . . . I don't know for certain if that is still the case now.
The rationale behind Rodgers actions / complaints is he expected carte blanche, red carpet treatment for as long as he wanted to play in GB (especially given his level of play). IIRC, the Packers were in the hunt for the SB and a couple of years ago approached Rodgers and got him to renegotiate his contract to free up some cap space (which he thought would be used to upgrade the offense). Instead, they did not add pieces on offense and also traded up in the draft to pick Love, which did nothing to help the team win immediately and did not give Rodgers another weapon to improve the offense. Also, from what I have read, the restructured deal allowed GB to effectively keep Rodgers from year to year past this season (the cap hit wouldn't really impact them too much if they wanted to trade or release him moving forward).
All that peeved Rodgers something fierce, which is what got us to this point. By (allegedly) asking for a new deal with $90 million guaranteed, that would effectively make it next to impossible for the Packers to move on from Rodgers for at least three more years. He doesn't want to be worrying about being there year to year. He wants to just be "the guy."