The Super Bowl is in town: gambling paradise Las Vegas is now also a sports city

Like a giant round robot vacuum cleaner, Allegiant Stadium towers above the desert. The wind howls past the black glass facade, which reflects the Las Vegas skyline. A few years ago this place along the highway was still a dusty plain. Until an army of construction workers built the 1.9 billion dollar (1.7 billion euro) stadium. It opened in 2020, and is now the home of the Las Vegas Raiders American football team.

The largest sporting event in the United States will take place this Sunday at Allegiant Stadium. The Super Bowl, in which the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs will decide who will become the champion of the National Football League (NFL), not the long-eliminated Raiders. It is the first time that the popular final of the American football season (last year it attracted 113 million TV viewers in the US) will be held in Las Vegas.

It's about time too. Because if there is one city booming is in American sports, then it's Las Vegas. For decades, the gambling city remained an untapped resource for the US sports industry, except for boxing. That has changed in recent years. The flywheel has started turning: major sports teams are almost lining up to settle there. New stadiums sparkle under clear blue skies – with Allegiant Stadium the most eye-catching symbol of Las Vegas' rise as a sports city.

Sad concrete colossus

The Raiders' new stadium couldn't be more different from the old one. Until 2020, the team played in Oakland, the city close to San Francisco where it was founded in 1960. Home base was the brutalist Oakland Coliseum, a sad concrete colossus with a field where baseball was also played. The football players ran there across the brown dust of the baseball infield. Raiders owner Mark Davis spent ten years looking for a way to renovate the worn-out stadium or build a new home elsewhere. All plans failed, partly because Oakland did not want to contribute.

In Las Vegas it was different. Entertainment is the city's raison d'etre. So it handles large projects a lot more smoothly, says Steve Hill. He heads the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, the government agency in charge of the city's marketing. “It is not so much that we consciously attract those teams. But people know that we are doing our best to remove obstacles here.”

In any case, there were no obstacles when the first professional sports organization was established seven years ago. The temperature in Las Vegas often exceeds 40 degrees Celsius in the summer, but that first team was an ice hockey club. The Golden Knights, founded in 2017, play a mile away from Allegiant Stadium as the crow flies, in the gleaming copper-clad T-Mobile Arena. A year later, the city gained the basketball players of the Aces. Both teams are reigning champions.

The arrival of the Raiders, the Golden Knights and the Aces was simple compared to the event that best illustrates Las Vegas' cooperative attitude: the Formula 1 race that took place in the city last November. The street circuit ran along the Strip, the wide arterial road past all the famous casinos. Every day the heart of the city closed for the racing cars, after Vegas had been in disarray for months due to all the preparatory work. Formula 1 would also have liked to race in another top location, such as New York, but the authorities there are less flexible.

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Gambling on sports

Growth, and the willingness to stimulate it, is the story of Las Vegas. “When I moved here 36 years ago, there were about half a million people living there,” says Hill. “Now there are 2.3 million.” All because entrepreneurs were given every opportunity to build one casino or entertainment complex after another.

Las Vegas will most likely get another sports team: the Oakland Athletics, the baseball players that played on the same field as the Raiders, plan to move to the city from 2028. Las Vegas is investing $380 million for the stadium to be built – just as the city also contributed $750 million to Allegiant Stadium a few years ago through an increase in hotel taxes, which definitively arranged the arrival of the Raiders.

The glass facade of the football stadium can be opened, so that the wind can cool the players and up to 65,000 spectators in the stands. To keep out the worst of the sun's heat on hot days, the field is completely covered with a roof made of a special type of plastic. The grass does need sunlight every now and then, so the field is placed on an eight million kilo sled, which can be wheeled out in an hour and a half through an opening that the Raiders also call The Letterbox (the mailbox).

The investments in these types of giant arenas are not the only reason that professional sports teams find their way to Las Vegas. The latest push came from a Supreme Court ruling in 2018, which ended a nationwide ban on sports gambling.

Until then, Nevada, the state in which Las Vegas is located, was an exception to the ban. In every casino you will come across rooms in which long rows of leather armchairs are lined up in front of walls with dozens of TV screens on which sports matches are continuously broadcast. Casino customers can place a bet in complete comfort from the seats.

For the casino bosses in Las Vegas it was a golden business, but its exceptional position did give the city a bad edge. Vegas was considered seedy – a decent sports team owner didn't want to be seen there. But after the Court's ruling, dozens of states stood sports betting to. The sector made one enormous growth Through. Gambling on sports events has become so accepted that nothing stood in the way of the arrival of more major sports teams to the lucrative entertainment mecca.

Orange LED flame

Anyone walking through the main entrance of Allegiant Stadium will almost immediately encounter a 26-foot-tall gray torch, which according to the club is “the largest 3D printed object in the world.” At every home game, an orange LED flame is 'lit' on top of the torch, like a kind of Olympic flame, but in memory of Mark Davis' father Al, under whose ownership the Raiders won the Super Bowl three times.

On the base of the pedestal is a slogan: “Once a Raider, always a Raider” – once a Raider, always a Raider. Vic Mabutas is the personification of that slogan. He lives in Livermore, about 40 minutes from the old stadium in Oakland, and went to Raiders games for more than 45 years. Until the club suddenly moved hundreds of kilometers and an eight-hour drive east. Now he visits the stadium with his wife and two small children. It's his son's birthday and, exceptionally, he is allowed to run a bit across the field.

“I don't mind that move,” says Mabutas. In the 1970s, when he was a boy, the Raiders were known as a team full of rough guys who made dirty play their trademark. “If you're not cheating, you're not trying enough, was their motto,” says Mabutas. “It was a team for the common man. For the real fan, it doesn't matter that they are playing somewhere else now.” It is also not the first time: between 1982 and 1994 the Raiders played in Los Angeles.

But not every American sports fan reacts so smoothly when the local club suddenly decides to leave. While this happens with some regularity – a big difference between European sports culture and the American one, in which teams franchises are companies with their own exclusive market and a guaranteed place in the highest competition. The financial results are just as important as the sporting ones.

The proposed move of the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas sparked great anger among fans of the baseball club last year. “They are leaving, taking a big part of my childhood with them,” said one disappointed supporter to ESPNwhile a Los Angeles Timescolumnist wrote about a “disgusting” action by a club owner with dollar signs in his eyes.

“Clubs that move lose a lot of fans, but the owners are not stupid either,” says Jonathan Bosch. The Dutchman lives in the US and has worked there for years as a sponsor recruiter for professional clubs in basketball and American football. Club owners do market research, Bosch explains, and if they think they will gain net profit from it, they don't hesitate to make unpopular decisions. “Such a club moves to a market with growth potential. There they win new fans again. In America it's all about the bottom line.”

While some Americans see their old club leave, others see a new professional team in their city. Also difficult for Europeans to imagine: as if the residents of – say – Amersfoort suddenly have Feyenoord as a new neighbor.
Would they immediately take the club to their hearts? Judging by all the jerseys, caps and license plates with logos of the Raiders (and the newly founded Golden Knights) on the streets of Las Vegas, the average American does.

F-16s flying overhead

“Americans are different in that way,” says Bosch. “Sport is such an important thing for the people here. So if you've never experienced sporting success in your city and a team comes along, it's super exciting. And besides, there are so many divisions in America, politically, in terms of health care. When you sit in a stadium like that and the F-16s fly over, the team comes onto the field and the match starts… that brings people together.”

At Allegiant Stadium, Raiders employee Reese Whitaker agrees that Americans are “flexible.” This also applies to himself: “I am one hometown guy. I cheer for all the teams in Las Vegas.” The arrival of the Golden Knights and the Raiders did not take long for the twenty-something year old to get used to: he now gives tours of the stadium of the football club that he has only been supporting for a few years.

Behind him, through the meter-high glass facade of the stadium, the casinos along the Strip can be seen in the distance: the castle towers of Excalibur and the fake Manhattan of New York-New York.

Somewhere between those buildings could be the missing link in the Las Vegas sports landscape in a few years. Basketball icon LeBron James is keen to establish an NBA basketball franchise in the city. If successful, Vegas will have all four major American sports in-house. “It's just a matter of time,” James said late last year. “It's just right. This city has momentum on its side.”

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