As the 49ers play their 10th season at Levi’s Stadium, two types of football have typically been played in its Santa Clara neighborhood: the NFL’s version, and the local youth soccer version.
A football stadium next door to a kids’ soccer field would typically be an unremarkable result of urban planning. But the proximity of Levi’s Stadium to the Santa Clara Youth Soccer Park (YSP) has been an example of the ongoing power struggle between the team, which Forbes valued last year at $6 billion, and the city it now calls home.
The 49ers and Santa Clara have squabbled for years over the soccer park’s land, including several attempts by the 49ers to gain access to its 10.8 acres for parking or other assorted uses. As it’s the only soccer-specific facility in Santa Clara, the park won’t be given away without fair compensation to the city. And it doesn’t seem like a resolution is coming anytime soon.
Since 2017 (excluding the fan-less 2020 season), soccer matches have been happening at the Youth Soccer Park at the same time as around half the 49ers’ 44 weekend home games, according to Santa Clara Parks & Recreation Department field scheduler Burt Field. That means for more than 100 matches over the last few years, youth soccer players and their families have had to be cautious of drunk NFL fans as they get to and from the YSP, and deal with the stadium’s noise as they play.
Field told SFGATE that at the beginning of Levi’s Stadium’s existence, he tried to avoid overlap between Niners games and soccer matches when he was scheduling, because they “wanted to be good neighbors.” But when he felt that sentiment wasn’t “reciprocated” by the 49ers, he changed his view on booking the fields.
“If somebody requests it, they got it,” Field said of the YSP. “If nobody requests it, we’re not intentionally putting games on that field. But regardless of whether it’s the Super Bowl, the Cowboys or the practice squad, I don’t care — we’re going to use it if we want it.”
Soccer matches nestled up against the foot traffic of 70,000-plus Niners spectators is undoubtedly an inconvenience, one that requires soccer families to get special passes just to access the roadways on game days. Field has also had to station himself at the front of the soccer field parking lot, rerouting NFL fans who think they can cut through the YSP parking lot to Levi’s.
Back in January 2012, when Levi’s Stadium was approved and the Niners were preparing to break ground later that spring, 49ers CEO Jed York wrote in a letter to the Santa Clara Youth Soccer League executive board that the 49ers were “careful to preserve the Santa Clara Youth Soccer Park and its ability to operate even during game days.” Apparently understanding the concerns over getting to the YSP in the midst of 49ers game day traffic, York’s letter also included a proposition to “underwrite several regulation-sized additional soccer fields” and identified several possible sites for these fields at local schools, with the unsaid-but-obvious implication that the Niners could eventually take over the YSP space.
Santa Clara’s current mayor Lisa Gillmor, whose husband is a youth soccer coach and whose kids play the sport, had been a spokesperson for the campaign to bring the 49ers to Santa Clara in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Appointed to the Santa Clara City Council in 2011, she recalls the team continually assuring the community that the stadium would improve Santa Clara for its residents.
But once the stadium was approved and being built, the 49ers’ message changed, Gillmor said. According to Gillmor, the 49ers were seeking to park on the fields for gamedays, something Gillmor pushed back on because it would “destroy the fields for the kids,” she told SFGATE.
Around a year before the stadium opened, Gillmor said, she sat down with then-49ers CFO Larry MacNeil for lunch to express concerns over the lack of movement towards building the alternate fields. MacNeil’s answer, as Gillmor recalls it, still sticks with her.
“He flat out said to me, ‘We’re not going to build the fields,’ ” Gillmor said. “I went, ‘What? But you all promised the community you were going to do that.’ And he goes, ‘Absolutely, we’re not going to build those fields.’ ”
After Levi’s opened, the 49ers kept trying to acquire the YSP location to turn it into a VIP parking lot, sending an offer to the city in April 2015 to lease the fields for $15 million over 39 years — with a 20-year option and rights to develop the property down the line, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The offer also included $3 million for the local school districts to build three new fields as replacement. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsrooms.)
“At the time, the property was worth $3 to $4 million an acre,” Gillmor told SFGATE, “and they offered us $3 million for a $30 to $40 million piece of land with no replacement.”
The proposal was met with forceful opposition from the youth soccer community at the next city council meeting on April 21, 2015, enough that it killed the potential deal. Later that year, the city contentiously agreed to let the NFL use the soccer park for two months in 2016, around Super Bowl 50, to house a media center. In Gillmor’s words, the league “completely ruined and destroyed” the fields. The NFL was required to pay to rebuild them.
In 2016, Gillmor led the charge for a ballot measure — Measure R, “Protection of Parkland and Open Space” — that would put any sale of a city-owned public park like the Youth Soccer Park up to a citywide vote, meaning it would need a two-thirds majority to gain approval. The measure overwhelmingly passed, with 89% of city residents voting in favor. (Santa Clara can still rent the field for up to 180 days at a time to parties like the 49ers for major events, such as Super Bowl 60 and the FIFA Men’s World Cup, both of which are on the Levi’s Stadium calendar for 2026.)
In some ways, Measure R should’ve effectively ended the fight; unless two-thirds of Santa Clara residents vote to approve a potential sale of the YSP land to the Niners, the field will stay under city control. When SFGATE requested an interview with the 49ers earlier this season about the park, team spokesperson Ellie Caple sent an anodyne statement in response.
“The soccer park and Levi’s Stadium have operated successfully as neighbors for a decade, and we look forward to working together for many more years,” Caple’s statement read. “We have no interest in purchasing the soccer park.”
Gillmor is skeptical. She feels the 49ers are “trying to figure out loopholes” with the clear intention of eventually capturing the soccer park space, she told SFGATE.
The Santa Clara City Council has changed over the years and more 49ers-friendly members have landed seats, bringing more proposals to shift the park at least partly under team control. In January 2022, council member Suds Jain proposed letting the 49ers pay to use the parking spaces at the complex when soccer isn’t being played, which he positioned as an effort to address some of Santa Clara’s budget issues. Gillmor wasn’t receptive to the idea when it was proposed (it later fizzled out). She told SFGATE she does not want the 49ers to “get a foot in the door.”
As long as ideas keep coming forward for the soccer park, the tension will remain. What’s especially frustrating to Gillmor and Field is how a pretty simple thing has become complicated because of a broken down partnership.
“It could have been theirs. All they had to do was build three other fields that were similar, and I would say better. What we said was, ‘It can be the same or better, not same or worse,’ and we would have been fine,” Field told SFGATE. “We just want to play soccer. The soccer stadium was there before the football stadium.”
Field concluded: “Our days on Earth are numbered, okay? No one’s going to live forever. The less time I spend meandering in this bulls—t, the better.”
