• by Karl Greenberg , January 6, 2016

The Super Bowl will be played at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, and the San Francisco-based apparel company — which has been in the area since the Gold Rush — will also be an official founding legacy sponsor of the San Francisco Bay Area Super Bowl 50 Host Committee. 

Levi Strauss made his fortune selling jeans to the Forty-Niners, so it’s an appropriate tie-in given the name of the home team. Sadly, the team — which fired its head coach after one season — definitely won’t be playing in the 50th anniversary game.   

The deal with the Host Committee makes Levi’s presenting sponsor of the Committee’s “City Stage presented by Levi’s” in Sue Bierman Park. The apparel company says The City Stage will feature a lot of free live musical, cultural and performing arts entertainers, with Alicia Keys headlining and closing the Feb. 6 show.

To commemorate, Levi’s will release a limited edition sportswear collection that includes a wool varsity jacket, denim jacket and flannel shirt, available Jan. 30 at such San Francisco locations as the Levi’s San Francisco flagship and at www.levi.com.

The tech sector is, not surprisingly, heavily represented among others sponsoring the game — not to be confused with those whose participation is plunking down over $4 for an ad. Among companies sponsoring the game are The Boston Consulting Group, Google, Hewlett Packard, Intel, Intuit, SAP, Optum, Yahoo and Seagate. Others are Chevron, Dignity Health, Kaiser Permanente, Old Navy, and San Francisco Travel. 

Levi’s got naming rights on the stadium a year before it opened in 2014. The deal, the third-biggest naming-rights contract in sports, wasn’t cheap, as it means Levi's has to pay $220.3 million to the home team and city of Santa Clara over 20 years. The company has a five-year extension option for $75 million. In the stadium, the 49ers and people associated with the team all wear Levi’s.