SRed and purple signs line the sidewalks and interchanges. Corporate facilities and official merchandise booths are still being set up. The vast casino floor was packed with fans wearing football jerseys, huddled around table games and dropping bills into NFL-branded slot machines. We’re still days away from the first Super Bowl in Las Vegas, but on a drizzly Monday afternoon on the famed Las Vegas Strip, signposts for America’s highest holy day are already clearly visible .
These scenes would have been unimaginable even a decade ago, when the major U.S. professional sports leagues — only the NFL — uniformly shunned Las Vegas because of its association with gambling culture . But when the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs kick off the nation’s biggest sporting event at Allegiant Stadium on Sunday, it will mark an incredible rebranding of the city from venerable gambling town to America’s sports capital. reach the peak.
Over the past year, a place that was once off-limits to major sporting events other than major professional games has hosted the NBA Summer League and Season Championship Finals, the Formula 1 Grand Prix and the Sweet 16 of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament. Elite Eight. Next up is the College Football National Championship and the men’s Final Four. In less than a decade, Las Vegas has become home to the NFL’s Raiders, the NHL’s Golden Knights (who won one championship) and the WNBA’s Aces (the last two teams to win championships). Major League Baseball sports teams have begun relocating from Oakland, while an NBA expansion team estimated to be worth $6 billion is expected to follow suit, with LeBron James publicly campaigning for ownership. No city here in Riyadh is absorbing the sports industry faster.
But no event has marked Las Vegas as a sports mecca like the Super Bowl, an unstoppable pan-cultural event for a league that has distanced itself from Sin City for decades. In recent years, nearly $7 billion has been invested in transforming Las Vegas into a global sports hub, including building state-of-the-art stadiums and arenas, according to Bloomberg estimates. That number also reflects eye-popping tax breaks: No less than $750 million of Allegiant Stadium’s $1.2 billion price tag was funded by Clark County hotel room taxes, which at the time set a record for the amount of public funding for a football stadium . But if the $500 million in economic impact from the Super Bowl offered by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority this week comes close to expectations, few will argue with the return on investment.
“We are now the sports capital of the world,” said Oscar Goodman, a former mob lawyer who served as Las Vegas mayor from 1999 to 2011 and spent years working to bring professional sports to the this city. “If we don’t have a sport here yet, in a few years we will have it.”
For decades, America’s professional leagues have maintained a firewall between gambling and sports, a firewall rooted in the country’s Puritan roots and built in the face of an existential crisis amid the 1919 Black Sox scandal. That bastion has been strengthened with each generation of gambling disputes: the CCNY slashing saga, Tulane basketball, Pete Rose and Tim Donaghy. The NFL became even more determined to separate football from sports betting in 1963, when Green Bay Packers linebacker Paul Hornung and Detroit Lions defensive tackle Ya Alex Karras has been suspended indefinitely for his involvement in the game. This obsession with appearance continued into the new millennium, when the NFL refused to air a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Bureau commercial promoting the city’s tourism industry and even canceled a game scheduled to be held at the Venetian Casino. Fantasy Football Conference.
Roger Goodell, the introverted NFL commissioner who earned more than $500 million in salary during his 18-year tenure, served as a human shield for the billionaire owners he represented, and until recently, he Still following the path of decades, its stance on professional football is unambiguous. Despite the shift in public attitudes, the topic persists. In 2012, Goodell testified in the NFL’s six-year lawsuit seeking to block then-New Jersey Governor Chris Christie from legalizing sports betting in the state. “I don’t think gambling is good for professional sports.” Needless to say, he sang another song this week.
The first cracks in the wall appeared in 2016, when the NHL awarded an expansion team to Bill Foley, the billionaire chairman of Fidelity National Financial. Foley paid $500 million for the Golden Knights. But after the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act and opened up sports betting nationwide, everything fell apart and exposed the hypocrisy of the NFL. It turns out that these decades of moralizing have nothing to do with integrity, safeguarding the public interest, or “protective shields”: the coalition just wants a piece of the pie.
Like most conservative-leaning cultural giants, the NFL moves slowly, which makes its shift in gambling unusually fast. Not surprisingly, the NFL announced five-year contracts worth nearly $1 billion in 2021 that will see DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars become the league’s official sports betting partners, in addition to agreements with BetMGM, WynnBET, Fox Bet and PointsBet. level agreement.
“This stadium is extraordinary, we’re here, we can feel it … this is our stage,” Goodell said at Monday’s state of the league press conference in a dramatic about-face for his employer. Makes a good point. “For us, the stadium is key and the city is key. The city really knows how to host big events. We’ve seen that.”
The Raiders finally arrived in 2020 and thrived in an expensive venue at the bottom of the Las Vegas Strip. The Aces have become the undisputed juggernauts of the WNBA. F1 has signed a nine-year extension after enjoying encouraging success after a difficult start. Whether it’s the bottomless coffers of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund or the more than $300 billion in revenue generated by legalized sports betting six years later, the taps are turned on for major sporting events.
