WELCOME SOURDOUGH SAM
Written by: Moscowhite • Daniel Chapman
The Athletic’s David Ornstein and Phil Hay say the bit by
bit investment that 49ers Enterprises, the money-not-football arm growing from
throwing-not-kicking club San Francisco 49ers, has a structure to it that we
didn’t know about before. While negotiating to get their shareholding up to 37
per cent in January 2021 — since increased to 44 per cent in November — the
investors, led by 49ers executive vice president Paraag Marathe and including a
cast of tech founders, sport investors, property developers and who knows who
but maybe even LL Cool J, sorted out how a full takeover can look. They have a
deal to buy 100 per cent of Leeds United and the Elland Road stadium by January
2024 for a price between £400m and £475m. That includes what they’ve already
paid, meaning they have to find another £200m or so.
It sounds like they’re gonna, too, and they’re not even
going to wait until then. Hay ‘n’ Ornstein’s (Hornstein?) sources say the total
buy out ‘is likely to come sooner’. They’re seven per cent from majority
control as it is, although I’d still be tempted to buy five per cent and enjoy
being the 49ers with 49 per cent for a while. Andrea Radrizzani might retain a
small stake when all is done, which makes sense because he seems like a
sentimental fella, and also because his big stake has quadrupled in value so
far so why wouldn’t he.
Another detail of Hornstein’s report stands out: that if
Aser, Radrizzani’s company for all his sports and media interests, buy another
football club anywhere on planet earth before January 2024 then it voids the
deal with 49ers Enterprises. Presumably if the total 49ers takeover is done
before then Radrizzani can do what he likes, and it’s not a non-compete clause
(‘don’t buy Salernitana until 2024, give us a chance!’). But I’m also presuming
49ers Enterprises have listened to Radrizzani’s plans for a network of European
clubs and decided they’d rather just buy an unfettered Leeds United AFC, thank
you very much for the fascinating concept all the same.
The headline is the sale price compared to the purchase
price: Radrizzani said his initial investment in Leeds, to get the club off of
Massimo Cellino and the stadium out of the British Virgin Islands, was £100m.
That was summer 2017. To get the shell of a club Cellino handed over into the
Premier League and agree to sell it for more than four times as much, within
five years, is not a bad effort for a first timer. A framed portrait of Marcelo
Bielsa should have pride of place, I think, on the new coffee table he’ll buy
with his profits, but it’s a better look than Ken Bates glaring angrily at
plans for the Lowfields motel that was going to make his fortune if only the
sickpots and dissidents hadn’t made it all so hard.
The stadium Bates was going to bolt all that hotel and
nightclub nonsense onto is a crucial factor in the deal, by being included.
Although putting it in control of a separate but related Radrizzani company —
Greenfield Investment Pte Ltd in Singapore — made sense based on talk of hideous
material influences Gulf Finance House still somehow held/hold over the club’s
assets (I bet Salem Patel has the paperwork sewn into his suit), it made for
worry about future moves. Would Radrizzani hold onto it and charge rent, or
inflate a future purchase price? For good or ill, it looks like it’s all going
to the 49ers Enterprises, and given its redevelopment value, getting it chucked
in with a Premier League (we hope) football club for under £500m sounds like a
good deal for them, while making its ownership easier to track for us.
(Newcastle were sold this season for £305m. Burnley were
sold in February for around £170m, although that involved chucking a load of
debt on the club.)
With all this heating up, we should probably take even more
interest in the 49ers than we have already. They don’t just buy soccer clubs,
they’re all to do with a team called the San Francisco 49ers playing slow
padded rugby beneath the unforgiving Santa Clara sun. Last time we checked in
on the franchise, their fans were pretty miserable about feeling their
foreheads glowing in the uncovered cheap seats like they’re sitting inside a
chip shop countertop, while the team they travel forty miles from San Francisco
to watch wasn’t generating much heat. A win in December 2019 over the LA Rams.
A win in October 2020 over the LA Rams. And finally a win in November 2021,
over the LA Rams, with Radrizzani there to watch. That’s not a good enough
number or variety of home wins for a team the fans think should be going to the
Super Bowl!
Under fire head coach Kyle Shanahan and maligned quarterback
Jimmy Garoppolo have been having a pretty good time since then, though. Some of
the time, anyway. The Niners went to Jacksonville to play the Jaguars and
started by kicking the ball through the one-legged rugby posts for three
points. Then they gave the ball to their coolest player, Deebo Samuel, who ran
to the side and past all the defenders, scoring a touchdown. There was another
kick but only for one point and the score was 10-0. Brandon Aiyuk caught a
throw from Garoppolo and got more points because he was standing behind the
goal line, then both teams kicked three point goals although the Niners’ was
better because it was from much further away. Another Garoppolo throw went to
George Kittle, who ain’t no kitten the way he grabbed that ol’ pig! That was
another touchdown. The fourth quarter got weird as each team kept tackling the
other team’s quarterback, and players kept going down injured, so maybe they
should wear more padding. Niners did another three point kick, and right at the
end the Jaguars, who I don’t think have any connection to British Leyland,
barged over for a touchdown, making the final score 30-10 to our guys. A good
win, but keep in mind that at time of writing Jacksonville are 2-10 for the
season, meaning two wins and ten defeats, and their coach Urban Meyer is grimly
holding onto his job despite his carefully cultivated self-image as a family
man eroding when he was filmed flirting with a woman not his wife in a bar, and
his players reportedly laughed behind his back when his attempted apology
claimed she was ‘just there dancing’ and her backside being in his frontside
was just unfortunate for everybody.
That was back to back wins for our brave Nines, but could
they do it back home? Well, Santa Clara. The Minnesota Vikings came all the way
from Norway for the Thanksgiving matchup, and boy did this game swing! As the
fans on the sunny side squinted at a pitch in shade of the posh boxes opposite,
Vikings went ahead twice, 49ers got them back twice, so half-time was 14-14.
The first Niners score was the best, my man Deebo Samuel getting the ball and
just running wide and along the touchline, making the tackling attempts look
pretty silly on his way to the downzone, where he did a barrel roll just for
kicks. Deebo was doing it again in the second half/third quarter, running 49
yards and pushing people out of his way and skipping around them to help set up
a touchdown for himself, from another cute run through the gaps. He’s really
good at this game, and he has lots of different celebrations! I like him.
From the restart 49ers intercepted, took the ball straight
to the Norse goal line, then scored again for an important 28-14 lead. Gunnar
Halle’s boys got a touchdown back, so Santa Clara scored a kick goal, but they
let Kene Nwangwu score a 99 yard touchdown just by running through them, the
idiots. Norway did their own idiot move, not kicking the conversion even though
they took it right in front of the posts. The Niners showed how you kick
between the posts and that was the last score, a 36-24 win, and the first time
the 49ers had beaten a non-Ram team in Santa Clara since November 24th 2019,
also the last time they won back to back home games. Now they’d won three games
in a row!
This weekend they were in Seattle against the Seahawks, who
had beaten the Niners three times in a row, and fifteen out of the last
nineteen times, but only won three games this season, losing eight. We got
another bout of topsy turvy scoring in a stadium noted for its rockin’
atmosphere, especially compared to Santa Clara where all anyone screams for is
shade and water. The Niners love giving players those long run touchdowns, 77
yards and a forward flip for Travis Homer to goal first. Gimme that 49ers
equaliser though, Garoppolo throwing to Kittle from a long way, really hard and
he caught it. Elijah Mitchell added another for the Niners, running through
loads of people from a couple of yards after good running from Kittle before,
and a field goal at the start of the second quarter gave them a 17-7 lead.
That’s loads of points, this game was in the bag! Seahawks scored after a cool
long throw was caught a yard from the line then Adrian Peterson just ran the
ball in from there, but Kittle also scored from miles away, the edges of his
toes on the out-of-bounds line as he ran to goal, to restore the lead, almost —
the extra point kick hit the post so they lost that point. And then damn these
Seahawks, or maybe damn these 49ers who kept giving away ‘personal fouls’ so
the Ocean Kestrels moved up the pitch and scored, then something called a
‘safety’ gave them two points for tackling Garoppolo in the endzone. It didn’t
look very safe to me, they grabbed him and threw him on the floor! I guess this
is why Niners fans want hip young Trey Lance in the team instead of old
Garoppolo. Now it was 23-23, and it got worse. On a first down, meaning there
were still plenty of downs to move the ball ten yards forward, Garoppolo threw
the whole thing straight to an Air-Narwhal guy, and they ended up throwing a
loopy shot into the touchdown bit for a goal, making this a 23-30 defeat. The
camera cut to Garoppolo sitting on the bench, looking pretty miserable in a
bobble hat. He must have been missing, like I was, Deebo Samuel, who couldn’t
play because of a groin strain. Also Trenton Cannon got knocked unconscious and
went away in am ambulance. I don’t know what a running back does but it can’t
have helped things. With eighteen seconds left an almost-touchdown pass by
Garoppolo was inches away from equalising, but a Seahawk beak clipped the ball
away.
“You do all this, good, bad, indifferent, whatever it is,”
said Garoppolo, “and that whole football game comes down to one play at the
end.” Sounds a lot like Leeds, man. Except we score.
We also have some quotes from coach Kyle Shanahan. “We’re
very frustrated,” he said. “We felt we had a lot of self-inflicted stuff that
isn’t always caused by the other team. I’m not taking anything away from them,
but we thought we had an opportunity at the beginning of the game. It really
felt like we were ready to go.” Also Deebo wasn’t there, Kyle, I think you
missed Deebo. Just put it down to Deebo and move on! Or, talk about your
quarterback. “He did some good things,” he said about Garoppolo. “Those two
picks [interceptions] weren’t good plays. He’s gotta get better with the ball.”
Some observers felt that last time I wrote about the Niners I was being unfair
comparing Shanahan to Paul Heckingbottom, as a young coach with a good
reputation thrust into his first big job (I did at least say Shanahan has ‘done
some stuff’). But we’re not far from hearing Shanahan talking about Garoppolo
without the ball, here. As far as the fans are concerned, though, it’s Joffy
time. Sorry, Trey Lance time. Same thing.
This makes the 49ers season record won six lost six, leaving
them 7th in the National Football Conference (not sponsored by Vauxhall to my
knowledge), in the last of three wild card places that would get them into the
post-season play-offs where they want to be, I think. They’re only 1-4 in some
tiny league called NFC West and that affects things? It’s really confusing, and
people say they’ll probably only lose in the play-offs, so to sum them up
they’re at the point where people are saying that with injuries and not much to
play for they should get Eddie Gray in, play the kids, and build for next
season. Anyway, right now they’re getting what you get for winning six and
losing six. At least they won’t get relegated!
