The San Francisco 49ers have their shiny new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, but they want more. (NFL teams are never satisfied and will run over your grandmother with a steamroller if it means just one more square foot of space in their stadium.) The 49ers are offering $15 million for 10 acres of nearby land currently used as fields for a youth soccer league, so they can turn it into parking lots and whatever else they want by 2017.
The city’s school district would receive $3 million to improve different soccer fields for the Santa Clara Youth Soccer League. Sounds like a good deal—the better deal, however, would involve telling the 49ers to fuck off and not displacing a bunch of kids playing soccer. From the San Jose Mercury News:
“How many more concessions does the city have to make to the 49ers?” asked Tino Silva, the new president of the youth league. “This is the 49ers — who are supposed to be good neighbors, keep their word and do what’s right. This is everything but that.”
[…]
Silva said the roughly 2,000 kids in his league practice or compete on the three fields almost every weekday and most weekends during soccer season. He fears losing access to the fields would force the league to downsize dramatically.
“That’s 80 percent of our season,” he said. “Where are we supposed to go?”
Mayor Jamie Matthews thinks the two sides can work something out—he and the city council could vote on the proposal in two weeks—but former mayor Patricia Mahan doesn’t see how Matthews could find new land for the youth leagues. She believes the city will take the money without a clear plan in place for new fields and screw everything up.
The 49ers suck.
Photo: AP
