7 Things to Know About the Complicated Relationship Between Santa Clara and the 49ers

Super Bowl LX is dominating headlines this week, and with the event comes national attention on Levi’s Stadium and the city of Santa Clara, which are hosting the big game this year.

But you might not know that the large sports venue, which serves as home field for the San Francisco 49ers (yes, it can be confusing), has been at the center of a host of controversies and battles between the team’s owners and Santa Clara’s leadership since it opened its doors in 2014.

In just over a decade, the team and the city’s relationship has become so contentious that it has already spurred multiple lawsuits, two different critical reports from Santa Clara County’s civil grand jury, a criminal perjury conviction for a sitting council member and wave after wave of big money pouring into local elections.

We’ve put together a quick digest of seven of the major points in the messy relationship between Santa Clara and the 49ers.

1) Mayor Lisa Gillmor

Gillmor, who has served on the city council for more than 20 years, has been at the forefront of just about everything to do with the team and the stadium coming to the midsize city, home to around 130,000 residents.

She led a campaign to approve a ballot measure paving the way for Levi’s Stadium to be built, and to be funded in part by nearly $80 million in city money, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds issued by Santa Clara.

While initially in favor of bringing the San Francisco team to her hometown, Gillmor’s disputes with the team started quickly and publicly, due to the team’s multiple attempts to take over adjacent youth soccer fields for a parking lot. Gillmor’s husband has coached youth soccer, and her children have played the sport.

Gillmor didn’t respond to interview requests for this story.

Since the soccer field debate, Gillmor has led the fight against what she has described as the team’s overreaches and its shortchanging of the city on revenue from events like concerts and parties.

While the team collects profits from NFL games, the city’s general fund is typically entitled to half of the profit from non-NFL events held at the stadium, such as concerts and corporate parties. The other half goes to the Stadium Authority, a city-run agency that operates the stadium.

“We were supposed to get a huge benefit from the stadium,” Gillmor said in 2023. “They’re using our police force, our fire department, our city staff, we’re all working so hard to get zero non-NFL revenue? That’s unacceptable.”

The team has defended its management of the stadium and commissioned a 2023 report by a sports economics consulting firm that claims Levi’s has generated $2 billion of total economic impact for the broader region. A team spokesperson said team officials were unavailable for a phone interview and didn’t respond to emailed questions for this story.

2) Election spending

49ers owner Jed York, apparently unhappy with the resistance the organization started to receive from Gillmor and her city council allies, began in 2020 an unprecedented run of spending huge sums of money trying to engineer a council that would be friendlier to the team.

Across the last three city council election cycles, political action committees funded by York and the team have spent more than $10 million to support preferred candidates and to oppose Gillmor and others.

The avalanche of money largely overwhelmed any other special interest group’s money in a city with roughly 60,000 registered voters, allowing several of the team’s preferred candidates to get council seats and retain them. However, Gillmor was able to keep her mayor’s seat with support from developers and police unions.

3) Company town

Roger Noll, a professor emeritus of economics at Stanford University, said the downside of a large sports team coming to a suburban community is that it isn’t too difficult for the team’s owners to “get control of the local politics,” comparing Santa Clara to the “company towns” of the old west.

The 49ers “would never be able to do it if it were a major city,” Noll said. “There’s no way that the Sharks were ever going to control San José like the 49ers control Santa Clara.

Likewise, there’s no chance the Rams are going to control the city of Los Angeles, because if you have a big enough city, there are other economic sources of welfare for the city available and that can counteract this,” he said.

“But in a small town,” he said, “they’re going to win. They’re gonna be the only people who want to contribute that amount of money to a political campaign, and they’re extremely likely to win.”

The team has supported an array of candidates over the past six years, including former Vice Mayor Anthony Becker, current Vice Mayor Albert Gonzalez, and current Councilmembers Raj Chahal, Karen Hardy, Kevin Park and Sudhansu “Suds” Jain.

4) Santa Clara County civil grand jury reports

By 2021, the “49er Five” — as the five team-backed members of the seven-person Santa Clara City Council were known — controlled the council. A county civil grand jury — made up of volunteers selected by the Superior Court’s judicial officers to examine issues of public concern — issued a report heavily critical of the group.

The 2022 report, titled “Unsportsmanlike Conduct,” accused Becker and four other council members of engaging in unethical and inappropriately close relationships with top lobbyists and officials from the 49ers. The team’s spokesperson at the time called the report a “political hatchet job” and accused the grand jury of corruption.

Undeterred, the grand jury followed up with another pair of reports in 2024 called “Outplayed” and “Irreconcilable Differences.” In “Outplayed,” the grand jury asserted the city of Santa Clara had signed itself up for an unbalanced and inequitable deal with the 49ers when it agreed to the ballot measure that brought the team and Levi’s Stadium to the city. “Irreconcilable Differences” lambasted the council itself for consistent dysfunction and tumult.

“The broken relationships among the members of the council and the inability of council members to work together as a cohesive group have undermined the effective governance of the city,” the report said.

5) ‘Three-card monte’

Noll, the economics professor, said sports venues are more often than not a losing game for communities, but football stadiums are the worst of the bunch, because they are too big to fill for most musical artists and other events, which makes it harder for a city running the stadium to collect revenue on a consistent basis.

Noll agreed the team outplayed the city in the agreement structures, and much of the divisiveness is rooted in the city not seeing the level of returns forecasted before the stadium was a reality, but he said Santa Clara should have seen that coming.

“It was just overly optimistic, and it was obvious it was. But on the other hand, this is Hollywood coming to town, coming to a small town, and they got taken away by it,” Noll said.

“It’s on Santa Clara for not doing their homework because if they had just looked at the previous five football stadiums that were built and saw what happened after the fact versus what happened before the fact, they would have known the same thing was going to happen to them,” Noll said. “So, yes, it’s true the 49ers played some three-card monte on them. It’s their fault for falling for it. They should have known.”

6) Legal fights

The city and the team have traded legal blows for years, fighting several lawsuits related to parking, rent payments to the city, and chiefly, how the 49ers manage the stadium through their management company.

The team also managed to cut its property tax bill by half, to $6 million, greatly reducing the money expected to flow to local schools.

Many of the disagreements were put to bed in two different settlements, one in 2022 and another in 2024. While the team and even the city’s own press release held up the most recent settlement as a fair shake for the city, Gillmor disagreed, calling it a “loan-shark type deal” in a reply to the city’s own X social media account.

Noll said it’s “unique” to see how quickly the bad blood emerged in the relationship between the city and the team. “Nothing has gone as badly” elsewhere, he said.

7) Anthony Becker perjury conviction

One of the most notable outcomes tied to the influence of the 49ers on local politics in Santa Clara was the perjury trial and conviction of former Vice Mayor Anthony Becker.

After a two-week trial in late 2024, Becker was found guilty of a misdemeanor for leaking an early, confidential version of the “Unsportsmanlike Conduct” grand jury report to the 49ers, and of felony perjury for subsequently lying about his actions to a grand jury as it investigated the leak.

The early access to the report allowed the 49ers to orchestrate a response to the allegations.

Becker resigned shortly after the conviction. He was sentenced in 2025 to two years’ probation and a 40-day jail sentence that could be served through community service. His attorneys filed an appeal that is still pending.

What comes next?

Though the current city council includes five council members supported by the 49ers, two of those spots are up for grabs during the November 2026 elections, along with the mayor’s seat, as Gillmor terms out.

A shift in the makeup of the council could affect Santa Clara’s relationship with the team. Gillmor, the most vocal critic of the team’s treatment of the city, will be gone.

But it’s unclear if much would change, said Ann Skeet, the senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.

“I think the issues that have plagued this relationship are still going to be there. One is the political money and corporate money in politics,” Skeet said.

The other issue is the underlying design of the stadium authority, which is a city board that oversees the management of Levi’s Stadium. The board members are the city council members, who Skeet said have likely contributed to some of the many conflicts.

“Publicly elected officials are supposed to put the public’s interest first and think largely about what their city’s needs are, the city of Santa Clara,” Skeet said. “But they sit on this stadium authority board, and then they have to think about what’s in the best interest of the stadium, and sometimes those things conflict.”