San Francisco was twice set to host the Super Bowl. Here’s why it never happened.
While Super Bowl 60 will be the third played in the Bay Area in February 2026, none have been played in San Francisco itself
The NFL is bringing a third title game to the Bay Area, with Super Bowl 60 set for February 2026.
Levi’s Stadium will play host for a second time in Santa Clara, 10 years after its initial run at the NFL’s grandest game. Stanford Stadium hosted a 49ers Super Bowl win back in 1985.
Even though the 49ers still carry the San Francisco name, there has never been a Super Bowl in The City by the Bay itself.
It’s not for lack of trying on the NFL’s part. In fact, the league tried to have the 49ers host a San Francisco Super Bowl twice before, only for plans to fall apart.
In 1994, the NFL awarded San Francisco and the 49ers Super Bowl XXXIII in 1999 to be played at Candlestick Park. News reports at the time indicated the NFL chose the Bay Area over Miami because of the promise of $26 million in renovations to Candlestick.
Those renovations, of course, never came to fruition. Two years after awarding the game, the NFL and San Francisco agreed to postpone the city’s Super Bowl until the 49ers could build a new stadium, shifting the ‘99 game down to Miami.
By the next fall, things started looking up. San Francisco voters approved two different ballpark measures in the time between, first allowing the Giants to build a baseball stadium downtown (which we now know as Oracle Park) in the fall of ‘96.
Then, in June 1997, San Francisco voters narrowly passed a $100 million bond that would help fund a stadium and mall project, estimated to cost $525 million, built at Candlestick Point.
But shortly after that vote came through, 49ers owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. got tangled up in the corruption case for Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, with DeBartolo eventually pleading guilty to a felony of failure to report an extortion attempt.
DeBartolo paid a $1 million fine, was suspended by the NFL for a year and eventually ceded control of the 49ers to his sister, Denise DeBartolo York, and her husband, John.
The instability led the NFL to pull the Super Bowl back from San Francisco again, and while Oakland put its hand up to try to host, the league chose to take the 2003 game to San Diego instead.
(Perhaps that the Raiders could have replicated a sort of home region advantage, like the 49ers did at Stanford in ‘85, when they made Super Bowl XXXVII in 2003. But instead, they lost to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in San Diego.)
While the 49ers claimed at the time that they were still trying to get the stadium built in time for the 2003 game, we now know they never did build in San Francisco. It would take more than a decade and a 45-mile move south to Santa Clara to finally get the 49ers a new stadium.
When the NFL pulled the 2003 Super Bowl at its meetings in 1999, John York seemed bullish on the region’s chances of being a consistent host of the NFL’s biggest event.
“If there is a Super Bowl stadium in the San Francisco Bay Area, you know good and well the NFL is going to be desirous of having the Super Bowl there on a regular basis,” York told reporters back on March 16, 1999. “That whole community is just perfect for the Super Bowl.”
It’s taken nearly a quarter-century, but the second Super Bowl coming to the Bay Area in less than a dozen years sure makes those words ring true today.