Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The San Francisco 49ers will face off with the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday in the hope of clinching their sixth Super Bowl victory, a feat that would put it in the ranks of the most successful teams competitively in National Football League history.
The franchise’s president, Al Guido, is also fixed on another goal: making it one the most financially successful teams in the league.
“There is one team that we’re chasing off the field from a business perspective and revenues perspective, and that’s the Dallas Cowboys,” he said in an interview with the Financial Times, referring to the most valuable team in professional sports, with an estimated franchise value of $9bn, according to Forbes. The Niners, as they are known, currently rank ninth on the Forbes NFL list at $6bn.
Guido knows the blueprint. A native of New Jersey and a former college football player, he worked for two years as a sales manager for the Cowboys’ front office and subsequently for Legends, the hospitality group founded by the owners of the Cowboys and Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees.
Even before securing their Super Bowl berth, the 49ers have racked up a series of front-office wins this season. The entity that owns the team completed its acquisition of English football’s Leeds United, extended its stadium and team sponsor rights, worth $170mn, with Levi Strauss, and led the NFL in ticket revenues for the first time in franchise history.
“We now have seven of the top 10 largest NFL gate receipts in history, this year breaking all records with a $30mn-plus gate for a regular season game,” said Guido. In the 10 days since securing their Super Bowl spot, the 49ers have sold $23mn in merchandise — more than double the figure they recorded at their last Super Bowl appearance in 2020.
Guido has been president of the storied Bay Area franchise since 2016, during which time the team has transformed on and off the field. A year after Guido joined, the team hired its current head coach, Kyle Shanahan, and parted ways with former quarterback Colin Kaepernick, who opted out of his contract with the team.
The 49ers have since gone on multiple playoff runs and appeared in one other Super Bowl, in 2020, also against the Chiefs, although they have not won the top prize in 30 years. Should they end up victorious on Sunday, the Niners would be tied with the New England Patriots and Pittsburgh Steelers for the most all-time Super Bowl wins.
The team, named for the prospectors in the San Francisco gold rush of 1849, has been owned since 1977 by the family of Edward DeBartolo Jr, a real estate developer from Youngstown, Ohio. The 49ers enjoyed a dynastic run in the 1980s, winning four Super Bowls with quarterback Joe Montana at the helm, but receded into mediocrity and endured a nine-year playoff drought in the 2000s.
Today, the team is fronted by DeBartolo’s 42-year-old nephew, Jed York, who briefly worked as an analyst at Guggenheim Partners before becoming the face of the family’s team ownership. He has devoted himself to the 49ers while also dabbling in another storied San Francisco industry: venture capital. His firm, Aurum Partners, has invested in Silicon Valley start-ups like shoemaker Allbirds and file sharing platform Dropbox.
In August, Aurum Partners filed paperwork with the SEC seeking to raise $50mn from investors for a new venture fund.
The 49ers declined to comment on the venture capital activities and to make York available for an interview. Aurum and the 49ers are affiliate enterprises of the DeBartolo-York family, and Guido as team president oversees all business operations for the 49ers.
The front office has been catching up with other American sports dynasties in expanding the 49ers’ brand appeal beyond the Bay Area. Guido pointed to the York family’s initiative to take part in the first regular season NFL game played outside the US, in Mexico City, in 2005, “when frankly, most teams didn’t want to give up a home game [in ticket sales]”, he said.
The league launched its international series two years later, bringing fixtures to London’s Wembley Stadium and which has also expanded to Germany, Mexico, and will this year play in Brazil.
More recently, the 49ers have been focused on the development of their 10-year-old stadium about an hour south of San Francisco, in Santa Clara. Guido said the ownership had plans to spend about $200mn in refurbishments over the next two years, leading up to an A-list slate of fixtures it planned to host at Levi Stadium, including the 2026 Super Bowl and Fifa World Cup.
In contrast to some other modern US sports empires with transatlantic portfolios — the Kroenkes, Glazers, and Fenway Sports Group’s John Henry — Guido said his primary focus was not acquiring other teams but rather on the 49ers’ performance as well as bringing Leeds back to the Premier League.
“We’re never going to rule anything out,” said Guido. “We know we have two franchises right now where our sole commitments are to make them as best as they possibly can be.”
Read the full article here