Sidewalks and overpasses are decorated with red and purple signs. Corporate installations and official product stands are still being established. Vast casino floors filled with fans dressed in football jerseys, gathered around table games and placing bills on NFL-branded slot machines. The first Super Bowl in Las Vegas was still days away, but signs for America’s great holy day were already in full view on a drizzly Monday afternoon on the famous Strip.
These were scenes that would have been unimaginable even a decade ago, when the United States’ major professional sports leagues — none other than the NFL — were collectively shunning Vegas because of its association with gambling culture. But when the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs kick off the nation’s largest sporting event at Allegiant Stadium on Sunday, it will mark the culmination of the city’s improbable rebranding from former gambling town to America’s sports capital.
Over the past calendar year, the region, once off-limits to major sports outside of major prizefights, has hosted the NBA Summer League and Intraseason Tournament finals, the Formula 1 Grand Prix, and the Sweet 16 and Elite Eight of the men’s NCAA basketball tournament. . Next up is college football’s national championship game and the men’s Final Four. In less than a decade, Las Vegas has become the home of the NFL’s Raiders, the NHL’s Golden Knights (who have already won a championship) and the WNBA’s Aces (the last two in the cavalry). While Major League Baseball Athletics is already in the process of relocating from Oakland, an NBA expansion team worth an estimated $6 billion is expected to follow, with LeBron James openly campaigning for ownership. No city this side of Riyadh is sweeping away sports facilities faster.
But no event marks the arrival of Las Vegas as a sports mecca quite like the Super Bowl, the all-conquering pan-cultural event for a league that has kept its distance from the Sin City for decades. Nearly $7 billion has been committed in recent years to transform Vegas into a global sports hub, according to a Bloomberg estimate that includes the construction of state-of-the-art stadiums and arenas. That figure also includes eye-popping tax breaks: At least $750 million of Allegiant Stadium’s $1.2 billion price tag was financed by Clark County hotel room taxes; this was a record amount of public funding for a football stadium. But if the $500 million economic impact expected by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority from this week’s Super Bowl is close to target, few would dispute the return on investment.
“We’re the sports capital of the world right now,” said former mob lawyer Oscar Goodman, who was mayor of Las Vegas from 1999 to 2011 and tried for years to bring professional sports to the city. “If there is no sport here yet, we will have that in a few years.”
For decades, America’s professional leagues adhered to a firewall between gambling and sports that stemmed from the country’s Puritan roots and was erected in the face of an existential crisis during the 1919 Black Sox scandal. That bulwark has grown stronger with each passing generation’s betting chaos: CCNY’s point-scoring division, Tulane basketball, Pete Rose and Tim Donaghy. The NFL’s determination to separate football from sports betting was redoubled in 1963, when Green Bay Packers halfback Paul Hornung and Detroit Lions linebacker Alex Karras were suspended indefinitely for betting on games. The obsession with appearances continued into the new millennium, when the NFL famously refused to run an ad promoting the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority promoting the city’s tourism and even canceled a fantasy football convention planned for the Venetian casino.
NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, who until recently was paid more than $500 million during his 18-year tenure as a human shield for the billionaire owners he represents, has toed the decades-old line and been clear about where pro football stands. The issue even if public attitudes change. In 2012, Goodell testified in the NFL’s six-year-old lawsuit to block then-New Jersey governor Chris Christie from legalizing sports betting in the state. “I don’t think gambling is a good thing for professional sports.” Needless to say, he’s singing a different song this week.
Relating to: The Super Bowl is expected to be the biggest sports betting event in US history
The first cracks in the wall came in 2016, when the NHL gave an expansion team to Bill Foley, the billionaire chairman of Fidelity National Financial, who paid a $500 million fee for the Golden Knights. But everything fell apart after the 2018 US supreme court decision overturning the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, opening up sports betting nationwide and exposing the hypocrisy of the NFL. Decades of moralizing turned out to have nothing to do with honesty, protecting the public interest, or “keeping up the shield”: the league just wanted its share.
Like most conservative-leaning cultural giants, the NFL moves slowly, making its turnaround on gambling extraordinary. To no one’s surprise, the NFL announced secondary deals with BetMGM, WynnBET, Fox Bet and PointsBet, as well as five-year contracts worth nearly $1 billion in 2021 with DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars as the league’s official sports betting partners.
“This stadium is phenomenal, and we’re here and we can feel it… and this is our stage,” Goodell said at Monday’s aggressively run state-of-the-league press conference, capping his employer’s dramatic run. “For us, the stadium is important, the city is important. This city really knows how to organize big events. We saw that.”
The Raiders finally arrived in 2020, and they thrived in their expensive confines at the bottom of the Strip. The Aces have become the undisputed juggernaut of the WNBA. F1 has achieved exciting success after a difficult start and an agreement has been reached to return for another nine years. Whether it’s the bottomless coffers of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund or the more than $300 billion from six years of legalized sports betting, the tap is on for big sports.