For 49ers fans who paid thousands of dollars to secure seats at Levi’s Stadium, it has been a frustrating year. First they saw the product on the field sour as the team plummeted into last place, then they began losing big money trying to resell their pricey tickets, and now nearly all of them are on the verge of being shut out of the Super Bowl.

Some fans say they were promised a chance at face-value Super Bowl tickets in exchange for buying seat licenses, which funded nearly half the cost of the Niners’ $1.3 billion stadium. Yet with the game less than four weeks away, those fans says they haven’t heard a peep from the 49ers — until late Friday, after this story appeared online — and are wondering who will be sitting in their seats for Super Bowl 50, although it almost certainly won’t be them. More likely it will be a corporate sponsor, a high-roller or even a politician.

“I think they totally disregarded us fans who put up lots of money to get seats at the new stadium,” said Sue Frantz, 59, a season-ticket holder from Dublin.

Still, the fine print of the contract fans signed with the 49ers noted there was no guarantee of Super Bowl tickets, and some fans remember team sales reps portraying it as a long-shot proposition.

The team now says it got so few tickets from the NFL — the league runs the game — that most fans will be left out, but it still plans on eventually holding a lottery that will likely give at least some lucky season ticket holders an outside shot at scoring tickets, a plan the team pointed toward in an email in September.

“Unfortunately the issue of scarcity of Super Bowl tickets for season tickets holders is something the host NFL team has to manage for every Super Bowl as there simply isn’t enough inventory to accommodate all interested parties,” the team said this week in a statement through a spokesman. “While we are able to provide 49ers (seat license holders) with exclusive access to pre-sale opportunities for most special events hosted at Levi’s Stadium, that just isn’t possible for the Super Bowl.”

It turns out the 49ers received only 3,000 tickets from the league and the team is still in the process of determining who should get them. A large percentage will go to suite owners, who paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for their luxury boxes, and the 900 or so businesses and fans who bought $80,000 club seats on the 50-yard line. Then there are the corporate sponsors, the VIPs and others, including team employees.

Any tickets left after that will be made available to season-ticket holders through a lottery to be held at the end of January, a week or so before the Feb. 7 game.

“I would expect that very few seats would go to the host team in a lottery and I wouldn’t have any expectation of actually winning that lottery,” said Fresno resident Bill Lacy, 43, another seat license holder.

If it feels late in the game for all of this still up in the air, it’s not, according to the NFL. Asked about the lottery, league spokesman Brian McCarthy said it “should be a concern” that it hasn’t occurred yet. In its email Friday evening to season-ticket holders, the 49ers confirmed that “a random drawing … will take place at the end of January.”

The Super Bowl tickets are vital to those who bought seat licenses at Levi’s Stadium because they present either a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to attend America’s biggest sporting event or to sell them for thousands of dollars in profit to help pay off the debt they incurred buying into the stadium. Prior to the opening of Levi’s, fans paid $2,000 to $80,000 a seat for the right to buy face-value season tickets, which cost $850 to $3,750 annually. The cost to attend 49ers games is the highest in the NFL, according to the Team Marketing Report survey.

Many fans who couldn’t afford those full costs planned to sell some of their tickets to subsidize their purchase. But this season, while the 49ers were stumbling to a 5-11 record, tickets on resale sites were fetching much less than face value. Additionally, fans trying to cut their losses by unloading the entire seat license have resorted to selling for as little as half what they paid just two years ago — making a potential Super Bowl windfall all the more important.

Although some season-ticket holders said they got a clear picture of their chances to land Super Bowl tickets, others thought they’d be likely to get them because they typically are given priority to other events at the stadium.

“I feel like they led me to believe I had first dibs on every event that would be held in Levi’s Stadium,” said Shawn Verrett, a 26-year-old seat license holder from Discovery Bay. “The right to purchase Super Bowl tickets was one of the deciding factors in me purchasing” the seat license.

Sacramento resident Roger Salazar, 45, who owns licenses to four seats, said “we were clearly led to believe that we would have a better chance at getting Super Bowl tickets if we were (seat license) holders.”

“Given the prices we paid for the seat licenses, I feel like we helped finance the stadium,” Salazar said. Fans cumulatively bought more than $530 million in seat licenses. “The least they could’ve done is offered us our own tickets at a premium for the Super Bowl.”

Though some fans said they doubted they would ever actually get Super Bowl tickets given how popular the event has become, they say the lack of communication from management — most fans contacted for this story said they had no clue what was happening with their seats for the Super Bowl — is the latest disappointment for seat license holders who were promised big things from Levi’s Stadium. Leading that list, of course, is the team’s sudden downfall from title contender to doormat since the stadium opened, but some fans are also growing weary of a stadium experience many say didn’t live up to the hype — with chief concerns over traffic, heat and a perceived sterile environment — making the tickets not worth the high cost.

“At this point, I wouldn’t say I’m upset with the Super Bowl process because it is not surprising in the least. It’s sad to say, but I’ve grown to expect this kind of treatment from them,” said Kevin Simmons, 29, a seat license holder in Cotati.

Many fans first inquired about Super Bowl tickets during the sales process, which began before Levi’s Stadium was awarded the big game. Then near the end of the 2014 season, the team sent season-ticket holders a notice telling them they’d be eligible for Super Bowl tickets if they paid off their 2015 49ers tickets early. Two fans won that drawing.

Then in September, the team sent fans a notice pointing toward a Super Bowl ticket lottery with a promise that more information would be coming during the season, while directing fans to partner sites that offer Super Bowl packages at a marked-up price. The season-ticket holders hadn’t received any further communication on Super Bowl 50 tickets since then, until Friday.

“It really sucks to see that I put that much money forward to only (hear) that I’m entered into a drawing, and until this date have not heard a word from them at all. At least give me hope — like an email update,” said Phillip Nguyen 33, a season-ticket holder from San Jose.

Nguyen should have received an email update Friday. Hope, however, is another matter.