The San Francisco 49ers were one of the many NFL teams that played their entire home schedule last year without fans in attendance. While the COVID-19 pandemic will continue to impact the NFL offseason and may have an effect on the regular season, 49ers president Al Guido believes the team will be able to play in front of its home crowd for the 2021 season.
The team worked with Santa Clara County to turn their stadium into a mass vaccination center in February, and on Tuesday they announced the development of a medical advisory committee to help oversee the implementation of plans to safely return fans by the start of the season. Guido on Tuesday joined Steiny, Guru and Dibs on 95.7 The Game in San Francisco in expressed optimism about fan attendance because of those two steps.
“We are optimistic,” Guido said. “It started in two phases and we’re into the second phase now. The first phase was opening up the mass vaccination center (at Levi’s Stadium), which is awesome. We’ve done over 20,000 vaccinations to date. We started doing around 5,000 a day this week, so that’s going really, really well here with the help of all of our partners.
“And then the second part was – today we announced the medical advisory committee – which is, frankly, really led by not just Bay Area, but world-renowned infectious disease experts to get us to a point … we gotta get fans back in the stands. We gotta get back on the field. We gotta do all those things, but we have to do it safely. I’m confident that with the leadership group that we’re announcing today that we’ll put the right measures in place to make sure that we can have fans when we kick back off in August and September. So I feel really good about it.”
While some NFL teams and clubs from other professional leagues have started allowing fans in a limited capacity, Guido wouldn’t put a number on the amount of people who could potentially be allowed inside Levi’s Stadium because of the time left until the start of the season.
“I’m not putting a number out there today,” Guido said. “Because the reality is … it’s hard when you’re in it. It feels like the days are long, the weeks are long, the months are long, but the reality is we’ve only been in this for a year. And it’s amazing how far we’ve come in just a year. We played 256 regular season NFL games. We played a Super Bowl. We got them all off. There’s other sports going on right now. I’m confident that there’ll be fans in the stands for those sports here in the Bay Area. We still have five, six months to go before we have to put our product back on the field. For me, I don’t want to limit ourselves.”
There are no deadlines for when the team has to announce the permitted attendance, and part of that number would rely on the county’s guidelines.
While the advisory committee will help set guidelines, the 49ers’ president said much of his confidence is derived from the initial step of setting up Levi’s Stadium as a vaccination center. That aspect of ending the pandemic will be a key aspect in allowing the most possible fans in the doors by the start of the season.
“I’m confident. Call me a vaccine optimist,” Guido said. “Like, I am confident that with the right supply that operationally, we can pull this off and vaccinate a large percentage of not just obviously Bay Area residents, but season ticket holders alike. So for me, yes, there’s always contingency planning. But the reality is the more vaccines we can get in arms, and the faster we can do so, that the likelihood that we would have fans in gets me more and more optimistic every single day.”
Leave a Reply