The iconic catchphrase ‘Viva Las Vegas’, crooned by Elvis Presley throughout his record-breaking Vegas residency, was recently co-opted by Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce after his team’s Super Bowl victory. Vegas viewers now wonder if it’s a sign that there’s a new sheriff in town: the sports industry.
The game was the first in Super Bowl history to ever be played in Las Vegas, which is quickly becoming a major US sports capital and shaking up its world-famous gaming, or gambling, industry.
University of Nevada, Las Vegas Economics Professor Bill Robinson says the transition has been a long time coming.
BILL ROBINSON: Every 20 years or so, since the end of World War II, Vegas has reinvented itself. It’s changed fundamentally what it is. It has to do with gaming, because for years, none of the sports leagues would talk to us. But as gaming has spread around the country, and then as the Supreme Court decided that sports betting is a thing that states can decide if they want to do or not, the NFL and the NBA all jumped into that world. And now all of a sudden, and the NCAA, we’re not an evil place - we’re a happening place.
In just the last seven years, Las Vegas has become home to three different professional sports teams, and is about to add a fourth. There’s the Las Vegas Raiders of football, the Golden Knights of hockey and women’s basketball Las Vegas Aces. The Oakland Athletics will bring major league baseball to Vegas in 2025.
To house these teams’ games, the city has added two new venues in the past decade: T-Mobile Arena for the Golden Knights and Allegiant Stadium for the Raiders. And just this week, Vegas released drawings of the new baseball stadium they plan to build for the Athletics.
Together with @BIG_Architects and @HNTBCorp, we have unveiled the design for our new ballpark project in Las Vegas on the Tropicana site. BIG will serve as the design lead and HNTB as the sports/hospitality designer and architect of record.
— Oakland A's (@Athletics) March 5, 2024
Images by Negativ pic.twitter.com/mvpiCBXD54
All are located in close proximity to the city’s famous strip, which Robinson says will be getting a family-friendly brand makeover, which should bring millions more to this once forlorn desert city.
ROBINSON: I think the biggest benefit we have from this now is gazillions of dollars in free advertising. So every time they play, the announcers are in Vegas, and they’re showing Vegas, and they’re talking about everything that’s going on. And we don’t need to convince Middle America that Vegas is a good place, a fun place, the place that they can go, or they even take their kids. That’s hours and hours and hours and hours of free advertising. So, it starts to convince people that it’s not just you know, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But there’s other things to do. So, it’s expanding our market dramatically.
Having hosted prestigious events like the Las Vegas F1 Grand Prix, which will run annually for the next ten years, the city is also now catering to an ever-expanding high-class crowd.
With Las Vegas set to host the Pac-12 men’s and women’s basketball tournament this month, and a USC versus LSU preseason football game in the fall, Trojans will have a special chance to experience the new spin on Sin City. Regardless of the outcome, it’s a fair bet to say that for Vegas, the house always wins.
For Annenberg Media, I’m Delaney Polocheck.