The Super Bowl will be played at Allegiant Stadium, which received $750 million in public subsidies even as the city’s schools and other services have gone wanting.
The history of Las Vegas has been marked by a relentless churn of hotels, casinos, theaters and restaurants. But only recently has the city’s landscape included major professional sports teams.
The Golden Knights of the National Hockey League were the first to start play here in 2017. The Aces of the Women’s National Basketball Association started in 2018, and the National Football League’s Raiders arrived from Oakland in 2020. Last year, Major League Baseball’s Athletics were given the go-ahead to make the same Oakland-to-Las Vegas move, and the National Basketball Association is expected to add a team in the coming years.
Las Vegas’s transformation into a pro sports town reflects not just the leagues’ interest in the city and their general embrace of sports betting, but also the power of the region’s primary economic driver, tourism. No other major city in the United States is as reliant on a single industry, and a broad coalition led by the top resort operators helped win lucrative subsidies to build new stadiums, with the thought that out-of-town visitors would follow.
Those efforts will be on display on Sunday when Allegiant Stadium, home of the Raiders and built partly with public money, hosts Super Bowl LVIII between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers.
“Our role here and what Vegas provides is a platform for people with great ideas to come in and make them real,” said Steve Hill, the president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and the man most responsible for helping to entice the teams to the city. “We’re a destination that is trying to say yes.”
Not everyone has embraced that strategy, however. In Las Vegas, the decision to set aside public money for privately held teams has amplified scrutiny of the state’s funding of critical social services, most notably for education in the nation’s fifth-largest public school district, with about 300,000 students.
Ooo, look. Welfare for the filthy stinking rich.
People keep asking me why i don’t like soccerfootball. The thing pretty much everyone likes around me. I find it very boring but usually answer with: i don’t wanna watch a bunch of millionaires play with a ball for 90min just to make some rich corrupt assholes even more rich. I love playing football, it’s great, you only need a ball and get going. But watching it is almost disgusting. Not even counting in the “fans” who need to burn down cities because they are cranky
Don’t forget the advertising that’s constantly rammed down your throat. With all that, plus timeouts and other crap, there’s only about twenty minutes of actual gameplay in the whole ninety minutes.
Yeah i was talking about the soccer kind. I did read some time ago that they thought about making two halftimes to cram more commercials in. Because having billboards in the stadium the whole time.
90 minutes? a typical nfl game broadcast is over double that–with less than 20 minutes of ‘action’,
and the super bowl is a lot worse.
I don’t watch football, so I just went by what the post I was replying to said.
It’s always been clear to non Americans that you guys love football more than universal healthcare and other social safety nets. Between high school/college/NFL you guys pay more out of taxes and out of pocket than the cost of universal care for everyone in the nation.
Do the sports teams in your country 100% pay for their own stadiums? I mean, I hate that cities are held hostage over these billionaires, too.
They generally provide subsidies and tax breaks like they do all corporations, but any public stadium needs rent paid if it’s used by a team. So even the ones that were built by the city charge rent to the big sports team.
That’s the same thing we do. The rent is peanuts and before the stadium is paid of the team is demanding a new one.
On top of that, I imagine Las Vegas residents are sick enough with drunk asshole tourists stumbling off The Strip and into town on a daily basis as it is.
Las Vegas is a very strange place. Being on The Strip was one of the most unpleasant experiences of my life. The city itself is lovely. It has a bunch of really good bookstores. If I ever end up having to go to Las Vegas again (I’ve only been for conventions), I’ll spend as much time in the city proper as possible and away from all the people who came for Adult Disneyland.
Vegas is extremely spread out. Not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, but what you might think is just a quick 5 minute run to the store might actually end up being a half a day ordeal. My brother lives there, and I spent a lot of time there over the summer and fall last year. It is a cool place, even the strip imo (just depends on the day and local events).
I’ve been to The Strip twice at different times of the year and both times it was lots of cigarette smoke, drunk people and avoiding piles of puke on the sidewalk.
But I hear you get to be driven around in a Tesla in a tunnel now, so I guess there’s that.
