By Max A. Cherney
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb 6 (Reuters) – Sitting atop a Peninsula, San Francisco tends to get most of the credit for hosting Sunday’s Super Bowl LX between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks.
The Cool Gray City of Love, as local author Gary Kamiya called San Francisco, steals most of the Super Bowl thunder with posh parties, celebrity sightings and a massive fan experience in its sprawling Moscone Convention Center close by downtown.
The game, however, is played about 50 miles south of San Francisco in the Silicon Valley hub of Santa Clara, California. And the city next door, San Jose, is hosting a week’s worth of events that included the Super Bowl’s opening night on Monday.
Those are two cities which often take a back seat to San Francisco in the public eye, but maybe not this year.
“We play a major role, and much more significant than we did a decade ago,” San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said in an interview with Reuters, referring to the last time Levi’s Stadium hosted the NFL championship game.
For Super Bowl LX Mahan was given the honor of accepting the Super Bowl football in New Orleans at the handoff ceremony last year, where he spoke on behalf of the region.
Mahan, who entered the California gubernatorial race last week, helped raise the resources to turn downtown San Jose into a destination for tourists and fans visiting for the Super Bowl, including concerts and drone shows – “a lot of the things we saw in New Orleans that worked well,” he said.
With more than one million people, San Jose is the region’s most populous city. Mahan said he is aiming to bring more of the economic benefit of the Super Bowl to San Jose, since the vast majority went to San Francisco for Super Bowl 50.
So far, it’s on the right track.
“I believe we have essentially booked all of the hotel rooms for the Super Bowl in the city already,” he said.
SILICON VALLEY HOSTS THE GAME
Levi’s Stadium lies in Santa Clara, a city of about 130,000.
But it hits above its economic weight. It is home to the roughly $4.5 trillion artificial intelligence giant Nvidia, rival Advanced Micro Devices and U.S. chipmaking company Intel, to name a few.
The Silicon Valley city expects more than 100,000 people to arrive on Sunday, most of whom are destined for the game but others to watch parties nearby and participate in pre-game festivities, Santa Clara Mayor Lisa Gillmor told Reuters.
The city has hosted many large-scale events in the past decade, including numerous NFL games involving the 49ers, but the Super Bowl and the soccer World Cup preparations for the June 11 to July 19 tournament are an order of magnitude bigger.
“So, yeah, we’re doing it, but it’s taking a village to get this one done,” Gillmor said in the interview.
This year, she said, Santa Clara is getting a little more recognition than it has in the past, but San Francisco still gets the attention.
At the end of the AFC Championship game, the broadcaster proclaimed: “You’ve won, New England, you’re heading off to Santa Clara,” Gillmor said.
“Then they show a photo of the Golden Gate Bridge. We just need to build a bridge in Santa Clara.”
(Reporting by Max A. Cherney in San Francisco; Editing by Ken Ferris)
