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49ers Investing Heavily in Expansion of Leeds United's Stadium

The 49ers have spent lots of money this year, but only some of it has gone to their actual football team.
Grant Cohn|
Feb 10, 2025; New Orleans, LA, USA; San Francisco 49ers chief executive officer Jed York at the Super Bowl LIX host committee handoff press conference. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images
Feb 10, 2025; New Orleans, LA, USA; San Francisco 49ers chief executive officer Jed York at the Super Bowl LIX host committee handoff press conference. Mandatory Credit: Kirby Lee-Imagn Images | Kirby Lee-Imagn Images

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San Francisco 49ers

The 49ers have spent lots of money this year, but only some of it went to their actual football team.

They gave Brock Purdy a five-year, $265 million extension, George Kittle a four-year, $76.4 million extension, and Fred Warner a three-year, $63 million extension. That's a ton of cash. But they also lost nine starting players and are sitting on more than $46 million in salary cap space. So they could have spent much more.

Instead, they bought Rangers FC, a soccer team in the Scottish Premier League. In addition, they're renovating Levi's Stadium, a project that will cost them $200 million. Finally, they're expanding Elland Road Stadium, the home of their other soccer team, Leeds United, which recently got promoted to the English Premier League.

The expansion of Elland Road is projected to cost roughly $200 million, maybe more. It's unclear if the 49ers will foot the entire bill or split it with the city of Leeds, but they certainly will invest a large sum of money into this project. They've already spent £10 million on planning the project before any work has been done.

So it makes sense why the 49ers would decide to get younger and cheaper on their football team this year. Their owners have decided to make major cash investments into two stadiums -- Levi's and Elland Road. In the meantime, they need their highly-paid coaches to get the most out of cheaper players.

It's unclear how these big-money investments in soccer teams and their stadiums will help the 49ers' football team in the future. I'm guessing the 49ers' owners hope that Leeds United fans will become 49ers fans if football ever becomes popular in England.

Good luck with that.

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Grant Cohn
GRANT COHN

Grant Cohn has covered the San Francisco 49ers daily since 2011. He spent the first nine years of his career with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat where he wrote the Inside the 49ers blog and covered famous coaches and athletes such as Jim Harbaugh, Colin Kaepernick and Patrick Willis. In 2012, Inside the 49ers won Sports Blog of the Year from the Peninsula Press Club. In 2020, Cohn joined FanNation and began writing All49ers. In addition, he created a YouTube channel which has become the go-to place on YouTube to consume 49ers content. Cohn's channel typically generates roughly 3.5 million viewers per month, while the 49ers' official YouTube channel generates roughly 1.5 million viewers per month. Cohn live streams almost every day and posts videos hourly during the football season. Cohn is committed to asking the questions that 49ers fans want answered, and providing the most honest and interactive coverage in the country. His loyalty is to the reader and the viewer, not the team or any player or coach. Cohn is a new-age multimedia journalist with an old-school mentality, because his father is Lowell Cohn, the legendary sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle from 1979 to 1993. The two have a live podcast every Tuesday. Grant Cohn grew up in Oakland and studied English Literature at UCLA from 2006 to 2010. He currently lives in Oakland with his wife.

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