Summer's end in San Francisco and Leeds

The desolation of this early season international break is coinciding with the autumn, sorry, fall, and in America that means the start of a brand new season of gridironing the old pigskin out there in the wild wild Bay Area where the San Frantastic Niner Guys are hoping to touch down for a really super bowl in a few months. They're playing tonight!

So it feels like a good moment to catch up on what's been going on with our west coast kissing cousins over the last few months, and to what extent they've been distracting Paraag Marathe from his much more important work in Leeds.

That is a factor, or at least it's perceived to be. The Athletic's Tim Kawakami did a fans' Q&A over the summer, in which he addressed:

...a general line of concern I’ve heard from 49ers fans: Could the 49ers' heavy investment in their Premier League team be affecting the amount of resources they can (or want to) pour into assembling their NFL roster?

One worry is money, the other is time. Marathe is Leeds United's chairman; but he's still also Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the San Francisco 49ers American football team, continuing in his:

...long-respected role as the team's chief contract negotiator and salary cap architect, while overseeing the team's football analytics department, among other football duties. He is responsible for the 49ers compliance with the NFL's collective bargaining agreement and works alongside general manager John Lynch and head coach Kyle Shanahan on all aspects of the club's football operations

It's true that 9am in Leeds is 1am in San Francisco, meaning Paraag can spend all night working remotely with LUFC until 5pm West Yorkshire time, which is helpfully 9am California time, when he can log out of one Teams account and into another to get cracking on the day's pigskin planning. Me, I'd rather aim for eight hours sleep not worrying about the clauses in our players' contracts, but as I'm not getting that either maybe I should take a transatlantic executive job too.

Anyway, the story of the 49ers summer has been contracts, and hold-outs and hold-ins, and that, despite keeping a low public profile, has meant Marathe, because in his own words — from his introductory interview on the official Leeds United website in summer 2023 that has since been used to beat him over the head with:

“Just take the football negotiations piece ... to our supporters at Leeds just know that this is my lifeblood, this is my wheelhouse, this is what I do, I’ve negotiated contracts in my sleep. The ball may be shaped differently and the game is different but the agent game and the player game is very much the same and that’s where I made a name for myself in American sports, and so a lot of those same things I’m going to be able to apply. I think that’s what differentiates me from any other club’s Chairman.”

That, of course, has been easily used to ask just what Marathe was dreaming of when night's elves were busy inserting release clauses into the contract of everybody at Leeds that moved, and Max Wöber, along with his confident assertions from this May that, after playing the first month of last season, "with one hand tied behind our back", he was "excited about the fact that we have a full off-season, an extra five weeks to start planning our player and squad strategy."

We've not heard from him since.

This summer in San Francisco

Because the Niners' stories have concluded — on the very eve of the season — we have the luxury of skipping quickly through the tortuous drama, first, with star wide receiver, Brandon Aiyuk: his partner's vague and deleted TikTok posts, his videos of himself Facetiming a pal on another team about negotiations ("They said they don’t want me back"), his pre-season 'hold-in' of turning up to training so he wouldn't get fined, but not actually taking part.

The situation was sort of simple. Brandon Aiyuk is one of the 49ers' most important players. Their quarterback, Brock Purdy, just loves throwing the ball to him, which is an important part of the American football game. Aiyuk was on a low contract. Similar players at other teams had just been given very big contracts. Aiyuk wanted one of those. From the team's side, the 49ers wanted to give him a pay rise and keep him, but not by caving in to his first requests.

For Aiyuk, that meant social media posts hinting he may leave. For the 49ers, it meant telling him he could. The club gave him a couple of trade options and left him to speak to those clubs, which was a risky strategy as it allowed Aiyuk to explore his earning potential elsewhere. But this was also them playing their strongest hand: that the Niners squad means they are perennial big faves for winning the Super Bowl, and while that would be weakened by trading Aiyuk away, his own chances of winning would be weakened by leaving.

So, cutting to the ending, everything got sorted out, but only just in time for the season. Aiyuk might not be fully ready for tonight's opener — "he plays most of the game, usually," said head coach Kyle Shanahan this week, "and I’d probably be surprised with (him playing) that same amount" — leaving the Niners playing the first game with, let's say, one hand gently held behind their back, if not totally tied. There's also lingering unquiet from the dispute, with a bunch of reporters all claiming that the 49ers signed Aiyuk to the same deal they offered him before his 'hold-in', which Aiyuk's agent disputed with a winking emoji on Twitter.

Then there's the sifting through summer looking for reasons for the shenanigans, which brings Marathe's work into view. Tim Kawakami wrote for The Athletic that this was the 'weirdest negotiation ever', all to get 'a very sensible deal':

Marathe is not renowned for being an empathetic negotiator. He’s great at his job and has “won” more than his share of big-time negotiations for the 49ers. But in this negotiation, with a stubborn wide receiver that the 49ers absolutely could not afford to lose, things got off-line fast and never got on-line until the very end of this. And the logical offer they could’ve made in April wasn’t made until Aug. 13, let’s point that out.

And:

The 49ers’ negotiators didn’t really understand what Aiyuk was doing and were less than enthralled with his social-media adventures. Meanwhile, Aiyuk’s camp was endlessly frustrated with the 49ers’ hardline negotiating style. And maybe the two sides needed to produce some shocks to find out if the other was really paying attention.
...
...it’s a good deal for both sides that easily could’ve happened months ago, but circumstances and personalities prevented this

The other contract problem of the summer caught reporters by surprise so was a less drawn-out drama, but still managed a few mawkish scenes worthy of a Hallmark movie. Left tackle Trent Williams wanted a new contract, but this wasn't easily granted, as he's 36 years old. As it wasn't sorted by pre-season, he didn't show up, choosing to take the fines instead — between $2 and $4 million worth. The drama was all in his long-standing relationship with Kyle Shanahan, and how they didn't speak all summer — except for one unavoidable encounter at a teammate's wedding — until, eight days before the first game, Shanahan texted Williams to say, 'We need you'.

Williams responded: “You know the only way you are taking me off the field is on a stretcher. I am fully committed to giving you all of my physical and mental being if you can provide the security I need off the field for my family.”
The men shared their feelings, gave in a little, and soon a deal was done. The last holdout of the 49ers’ dramatic offseason was over.

As Ercole Cellino once said, 'You make puke'. And Williams will now make a guaranteed $48 million over his new three year contract, including a pay rise this year that will more than cover his hold-out fines.

Next summer in San Francisco

The hitch with Williams' contract wasn't only his age, but something that was also a hitch with Aiyuk, and it's not actually either of their contracts, but Brock Purdy's. The most important guy in gridiron is the quarterback, and Brock Purdy is the Niners' most important guy, although he wasn't expected to be and he isn't paid like it. The hand-picked successor to Jimmy Garoppolo was Trey Lance, while Purdy was a late and low pick — the 262nd player — acquired in the NFL draft. Lance injured his ankle, and Purdy impressed. Lance now plays for the Dallas Cowboys, and Purdy's next contract is due at the end of the coming season, and due to make him the highest paid player in the NFL.

The hitch is that the 49ers have a very good team because they have a lot of very expensive players, and the NFL has a salary cap. And that is very much Paraag Marathe's problem/wheelhouse, depending on your point of view. This summer's task was to give Aiyuk and Williams contracts that will keep them happy, while simultaneously lowering the impact on the overall salaries under the cap so that there will be enough money available to pay Purdy next off-season. Having good players, according to general manager John Lynch recently, "is a good thing. But it does make things tougher. Those are our challenges."

The answer is to do with everybody's favourite Profit & Sustainability phrase, amortisation. Without going into the details, guaranteed money and bonuses can be spread across the length of a contract in ways that keep base salaries low and mean more good players are affordable. But guaranteeing money upfront comes with the risk that you're guaranteeing too much to the wrong player.

Quarterbacks aren't so much signed in gridiron as anointed, and the decisions around Brock Purdy's new contract are viewed as generational, era-defining, Bowl or no Bowl moves. The Niners might even decide to do what they did to acquire Purdy in the first place — pick up some data-defined nobody from the draft to replace him, while keeping the other players in place around him ... in other words, selling their star player while trying to build a stronger overall team.

"It's not just about the talents on the pitch, but it's also about the chemistry of the squad and the mentality of the squad," Marathe said in May. "And we want players down to a man who want to fight with us until the end, from the beginning to the end. And so that's really important ... and sometimes you might sacrifice on other things to make sure you have the right mentality in the squad." He was talking about Leeds United when he said that, though.

The bright lights of Santa Clara

In other Niners bits, some news that will delight Leeds fans hunting for a tolerable pint in Elland Road. The Niners' ten year old stadium down the road from San Francisco, in Santa Clara, is getting $200m spent on it. Sounds nice. This is all to do with the 2026 World Cup, which is being held in North America and includes six matches at the Field of Jeans; and it's to do with the general expectation that the ground will also be hosting Super Bowl 60 the same year.

As such, it's not much to do with the fan experience, i.e. it's not a roof to protect spectators from the broiling Californian sun that beats mercilessly on half the unshaded stadium, despite those World Cup games due to be held in June and July. Punters will get better wi-fi and 'the largest 4k video screen in the NFL', though. Apart from that, 'more than 120 of the venue’s luxury suites are being updated with everything from new carpets and furniture to new technology' and there will be a new 'club' for around 2,000 fans, featuring 'open air bars', and I guess the luxury levels of those will depend on their proximity to the centre of our solar system. The main concourse will also get 'frictionless concession stands', but I don't know if that means the pies will be slid down some ultra-lubricated chute or what.

Outside the stadium the Niners are finding other ways to get their ordinary fans pissed, in the 'pissed off' sense, by making it harder for them to get pissed in the 'getting pissed' sense. The official car park is now subject to a system called 'directed parking', in which 'attendants direct cars into the next available spot', making it much more difficult for fans to hold tailgates in the parking lot. In case you're used to drinking pints indoors before games like a civilised person, tailgating is where groups of fans park together and eat and drink out of their car boots. Don't look at me, apparently it's traditional, and as such, we should defend it.

Niners fans reckon this does put tailgating culture at risk, as they can't just park up together ad-hoc away from non-tailgating fans. And they're not impressed with the Niners' suggestion that fans 'sync your arrival or meet your party at a designated area near the stadium and caravan in'. "The tailgating experience continues to get worse and I’m at a point I want to sell off my four (season) tickets," one fan has written on the online petition.

While we're on stadiums, there's a detail that has been catching my eye since 49ers Enterprises took over and started getting those nice write-ups in the Daily Mail ('These guys just get it' and so on), and that's board member Pete Lowy — the minted Westfield shopping centres guy from Australia — and his hankering for trams:

Lowy, it can be disclosed, is in talks with Leeds city council about that vast horseshoe-swathe (of land around Elland Road). They are ambitious. Leeds has, for too long, been a city held back by a transport system that consists of buses and more buses.
There is no underground, no tram network. While it is early, discussions include the prospect of Elland Road becoming a transport hub to link neglected South Leeds with a city centre it has been disconnected from since the building of the M621 back in the early 70s.

And:

It is not lost on those involved that Leeds is the largest city in Europe without its own transit system. Elland Road lies on the other side of a ring road which cuts south Leeds off from a thriving city. The talk is of a tram network, with a transport hub based at the stadium. The view is that such a connection would unlock regeneration for a neglected slice of town.
That is where Peter Lowy comes in. According to insiders, the Australian former chief executive of shopping centre giant Westfield is 'obsessed' with the prospect of a rail link and the potential for transforming the stadium and surrounding area.

Lowy's wishes might be coming true. The consultation documents for the latest attempt at a rapid transport system in Leeds include, in south Leeds, Option L6 sending trams past the stadium along Elland Road, and Option L7 going along Gelderd Road, turning onto Lowfields Road, going (presumably) through the tunnel under the motorway and then past Billy's Statue and up Wesley Street. Whichever options are chosen, this is all 'planned to begin construction in 2028 and begin operation by the early 2030s', which might make that a good time to be building some new lubricated pie dispensers around Elland Road.

The Red Bull spread

Not 49ers Enterprises as such, but it's their fault Red Bull are in Leeds, so I'll give it a mentino. I don't know what to make, so far, of Red Bull now also being in Newcastle and Everton, through sponsorship deals announced last week. In both cases Red Bull is becoming their 'official energy drink partner' and there's no mention of ownership stakes, although if stakes were small enough, there would be nothing to prevent Red Bull buying small pieces of several Premier League clubs the way BSkyB bought stakes in Manchester United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Sunderland and Leeds United back at the turn of the century.

The deal with Everton has been described as 'a record-breaking deal of its kind in terms of finances for the football club', and the prospect of their move to a new stadium next summer is an interesting detail:

The company's branding will be visible across bottle carriers, bottle coolers and ice boxes at Everton's Finch Farm training complex, as well as at home and away fixtures.
Supporters will also see the brand on the big screen and on pitchside LEDs at Goodison Park and, from the 2025/26 season, at Everton's new waterfront home at Bramley-Moore Dock.

Whatever the full form of these deals, these plus Leeds have taken Red Bull from nought to three in English football in just a few months, suggesting that after being Premier League shy for a long time due, it was believed, to the regulations that would make their usual playbook difficult to reproduce, Red Bull have found a strategy they think can work for them here. Which is not necessarily good news. ⭑彡