On Wednesday, Philadelphia sports bar Ladder 15 posted a screenshot on Instagram of a snarky email reply to a 49ers fan group looking to bring 200 road-tripping fans ahead of the Wild Card playoff matchup between the 49ers and Eagles on Sunday.

“After very little consideration, we cannot in good conscience host anything that has to do with the 49ers,” the email read. “We're Birds fans til the end. We Bleed Green. We Back our team even when it comes at a cost. Only reason I wish you luck, is because the 49ers are going to need it. Enjoy your time in City of Brotherly Love.”

The 17-year-old Philly bar’s owners thought their 5,000 Instagram followers would enjoy the light ribbing, not realizing they had just kicked off an internet-wide fan firestorm. The post quickly went viral, amplified by Eagles fans and blasted by 49ers fans. By Friday, the email was being discussed on the most popular sports podcast in America, "Pardon My Take."

“We got a voicemail to the bar. This guy calls and he says, ‘Hey, I want to order a cheesesteak, and after you get it, shove it up your ass,’” Ladder 15 manager Steve Dowling told SFGATE. “That guy called back later and left another message. ‘Hey, I want to order two more cheesesteaks, and I want you to take them to the steps by the Rocky statue, walk up the steps and shove ‘em up Rocky’s ass.’” 

Review bombing of the bar by 49ers fans got so bad Yelp was forced to lock down their page. “We’ve temporarily disabled the posting of content to this page as we work to investigate whether the content you see here reflects actual consumer experiences rather than recent events,” an unusual activity alert read on Ladder 15’s Yelp page.

“I get the Google reviews directly to my email, so Wednesday night I’m sitting at home, and at like 10:30 at night, I hear bink, bink, bink, and it’s all of these 1-star reviews. 'This place is s—t,' stuff like that,” Dowling said. “One girl said she got dragged out of the bar by her hair into the street. I just went through and started clicking 'report review,' 'report review,' 'report review.' It took me 45 minutes to an hour to get through all of them. It was like 120 reviews, and I had to report them all.”

Dowling said the bar estimated it was turning down around $5,000, but thought the reputational hit for hosting 200 Niners fans likely would have been worse.

“We’re a block off Broad Street,” Dowling explained. “When a celebration happens, like in 2025, 2018, everybody is at our bar because of the proximity to Broad. We are an Eagles bar — Cooper DeJean was in here a month ago. We’ve got a good relationship with Jordan Mailata. We’ve had a good connection with Eagles players throughout our history. It was a no-brainer decision. We had a line down road on Friday; if we would’ve had 150 49ers fans walking in there, we would’ve gotten absolutely destroyed. It was a smarter business decision.”

Dowling said he’s not mad at the visceral reaction from 49ers fans.

“But do I think it was a s—tty move? Yeah. We’re a bar run by four guys since 2009. We’re not a big money-backed bar. We work hard together, we all have families, all of our employees are like family — I just didn’t like it because of my staff. Kind of hitting our livelihood.”

He described Philadelphians as “s—t talkers but also s—t takers,” and had some praise for 49ers fans generally, especially the one who left the cheesesteaks voicemail, which they recorded for posterity.

“I want to buy him a beer and a cheesesteak,” he said. “That’s the one thing I appreciated about 49ers fans, how he went at us. I was happy he was out there showing his allegiance. I want to meet this guy.”

The Eagles host the 49ers at Lincoln Financial Field in the Wild Card round at 1:30 p.m. Sunday on Fox. If the Niners win, they travel to play the Seahawks in the Divisional Round in Seattle next weekend.