49ers “Why, today, did Al Guido, the president, respond in terror to Shorting Down?
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The San Francisco 49ers will take on the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday in an attempt to win their sixth Super Bowl, which would rank them among the most successful clubs in NFL history in terms of competition.
Al Guido, the team’s president, has another objective in mind: turning the team into one of the league’s most prosperous businesses.
In an interview with the Financial Times, he stated, “There is one team that we’re chasing off the field from a business perspective and revenues perspective, and that’s the Dallas Cowboys.” The Dallas Cowboys are the most valuable team in professional sports, with an estimated $9 billion in franchise value, according to Forbes. Known as the Niners, they are currently ranked tenth.
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The team, named for the prospectors in the San Francisco gold rush of 1849, has been owned since 1977 by the family of Edward DeBartolo Jr, a real estate developer from Youngstown, Ohio. The 49ers enjoyed a dynastic run in the 1980s, winning four Super Bowls with quarterback Joe Montana at the helm, but receded into mediocrity and endured a nine-year playoff drought in the 2000s. Today, the team is fronted by DeBartolo’s 42-year-old nephew, Jed York, who briefly worked as an analyst at Guggenheim Partners before becoming the face of the family’s team ownership. He has devoted himself to the 49ers while also dabbling in another storied San Francisco industry: venture capital. His firm, Aurum Partners, has invested in Silicon Valley start-ups like shoemaker Allbirds and file sharing platform Dropbox. In August, Aurum Partners filed paperwork with the SEC seeking to raise $50mn from investors for a new venture fund. The 49ers declined to comment on the venture capital activities and to make York available for an interview. Aurum and the 49ers are affiliate enterprises of the DeBartolo-York family, and Guido as team president oversees all business operations for the 49ers.