The city of Santa Clara’s showdown with the San Francisco 49ers over handing over budget documents to show who’s spending what on running the place got kicked up a notch before Thanksgiving, with the city council voting to find the team in violation of its lease, a move that could lead the city to seize operational control of the stadium if the Niners owners don’t cough up the documents by December 22:

“We hired ManCo. They work for us. They don’t get to decide what is withheld from the owners of the stadium,” [Santa Clara Mayor Lisa] Gillmor said. “How do we know we are managing this public asset in the proper manner if we cannot get the documents from the management company that we hired to manage the stadium?” Representatives for the 49ers countered that the team has been giving the city regular reports and has lived up to its end of the deal. They said the team is withholding information in two areas it considers confidential: security plans and financial information related to non-NFL events. Making security information available would put the public at risk, while disclosing the details of the non-NFL events would damage ManCo’s ability to effectively negotiate with promoters such as LiveNation and AEG Live, the team says.

This is a weird dispute to crop up just two years into a team’s move to a new city, needless to say, though Gillmor and friends have a point that it’s hard to determine revenue-sharing shares when your partner won’t fess up to what their total revenues are. That it’s coming up now seems to come down to a bunch of factors: new city officials elected since the stadium project was approved who are less starry-eyed about the arrival of the NFL; a crappily written lease that didn’t specify what documents the 49ers would turn over or how the city would audit their finances; and a team that’s so dismal on the field that even 49ers fans are probably happy (or indifferent) enough for the city to take them to task. (“The 49ers are broken all around the place,” resident Dorothy Rosa told last week’s council hearing. “They don’t know how to run a football team. They don’t know how to run anything.”)

And speaking of the Niners’ on-field woes, the terrible team continues to be terrible news for people who bought the high-priced personal seat licenses that helped fund the new Santa Clara stadium, only to find themselves forced to choose between paying through the nose for near-worthless tickets every year or unloading their PSLs at a huge loss:

[Tom] Addison wanted out after the 2015 season. He wanted to sell what the team called his Stadium Builder Licenses so he did not have to keep spending $5,000 annually for four season tickets in the corner of an end zone, a requirement to maintain the licenses. He was able to sell all four on the secondary market, but at $2,000 apiece after dropping his asking price, and recouped only $8,000 of the original $20,000 investment. The alternative would have been walking away from the licenses and getting none of the money back. “I was relieved to get rid of them,” Addison said in the dining room of his Burlingame home. “I was so happy when the guy wanted to buy all four. I was happy to get out.”

Which, you know, there’s that thing that P.T. Barnum never said about suckers — plus, about half of the PSLs were bought up by ticket brokers, who will just write this off as a bad bet. Still, with things so bad that 6% of all PSL holders have just defaulted on their annual payments and walked away with nothing rather than have to keep plunking down money for tickets every year, you have to wonder how eager, say, Los Angeles Rams fans will be to put down cash for PSLs once those go on sale next year.