In 1970, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce hired a management consultancy to come up with a plan to diversify its gambling-centred economy. Their recommendation: just stick to gambling.
“Their findings were that Las Vegas should not diversify or attract any non-gaming related companies because gaming was more resilient than manufacturing,” says Tina Quigley, chief executive of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance.
But Las Vegas officials have turned their backs on that advice and more than 50 year later “Sin City” is continuing to reinvent itself. This Sunday’s Super Bowl — the largest US sporting event — will be held in the city for the first time, in a sign of how it is embracing sport to diversify its economy.
Jeremy Aguero, an executive on the local host committee for the Super Bowl in Las Vegas and a longtime economic analyst for a local policy research firm, said the arrival of the NFL championship was the culmination of “a very concerted effort” to bring major sporting events to town, including recent and upcoming fixtures for Formula 1 racing, college basketball, and others.
“This is kind of what we’re designed to do. When these events take place in southern Nevada, they outperform how they do in other markets”, he said.
In 2017, the National Hockey League awarded a newly-created franchise team to Las Vegas, the Golden Knights, which became the city’s first professional sports team. Since then, Sin City has added the NFL’s Raiders and the WNBA’s Aces, which recently won back-to-back championships. Major League Baseball has approved the relocation of the Oakland Athletics to Las Vegas, and the National Basketball Association is considering the city as a potential new franchise host.
In December, the NBA launched its first midseason tournament in Las Vegas, a new concept for the league to drive ratings in the otherwise slow winter months. League commissioner Adam Silver said the inaugural championship’s success was due in part to its host: “I don’t think it was just the [prize] money. I think it was the competition, in part. I think it was coming to Vegas”, he said.
Having the Super Bowl in Las Vegas is also the culmination of a near-total about-face by American sports leagues to embrace the gambling industry, following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for legalised sports betting in states across the US.
Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, once said that if gambling were permitted on sporting events, routine plays and turnovers at each game “inevitably will fuel speculation, distrust, and accusations of point-shaving or game-fixing”.
This week, sitting comfortably within the locker room of the Las Vegas Raiders in a newly constructed stadium just off the city’s famous gambling strip, Goodell summarised how completely the world’s most powerful sports league changed tack on wagering: “We have to adapt. We have to embrace it. We have been cautious. We have been very thoughtful, I think, in our approach”, he said.
But that new embrace of gaming has limits: players and team executives remain expressly forbidden from betting while in town this week before the Super Bowl, where they have been staying in hotels a 30 minute drive off the strip in part to block out the distraction.
“It’s a long time to be cooped up”, one employee said.
Though the gambling business is doing just fine — the Vegas Strip generated record revenue of $821mn in November — city and state leaders are also pushing to expand the economy beyond tourism, gaming and logistics into higher-paying sectors.
Business and government leaders, led by David O’Reilly, chief executive of Howard Hughes, are flying in 16 chief executives from around the country for Super Bowl weekend to try to persuade them to move their headquarters here. Among the industries they are courting: biotech, fintech and Hollywood studios.
“We need to always nurture hospitality and gaming and entertainment, but we also need to be diversifying,” Quigley says. “So when we go through boom and bust cycles, it’s not felt as severely as it’s been felt.”
The city’s diversification effort has a new cheerleader in the actor Mark Wahlberg, who sold his Los Angeles mansion in 2022 for a reported $55mn and moved to the Vegas suburb of Summerlin, where he paid $14.5mn for a town house. He has been lobbying the Nevada legislature for a new tax credit aimed at luring Hollywood studios to Las Vegas. Sony says it will spend $1bn a year in the state if the measure passes.
“On moving here, I realised there was lots of opportunity, but outside of gaming, there’s not a lot of industry,” Wahlberg told the FT. “There’s a lot of really talented people here, and we want to create training programmes and vocational training” to increase skills.
Another new draw to the Strip has been the opening of the Sphere, $2.3bn entertainment venue encased completely with interactive LED displays for immersive advertising and visual displays. Irish rock band U2 has been hosting concerts in residence since its opening in September.
As the sports world descends on Las Vegas, it is imbuing competitive entertainment with the glitz of the region. About two miles north-east of the Strip, the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf Tour kicked off its Las Vegas tournament on Thursday, complete with showgirls and a “party hole” on the eighth tee, featuring a DJ blasting Britney Spears and Shaggy.
Wayne Newton, the singer and actor known as “Mr Las Vegas”, took the stage this week at the Mandalay Bay Casino flanked by two sequin-bedecked showgirls not for a show of his own but to hand out tickets to hype the NFL.
“The Super Bowl in Las Vegas is more than just a game” he said, just before handing out tickets to the fixture to a local business leader, “because it is about our community”.
Listen to Sara Germano preview the Super Bowl on our arts and culture podcast, Life and Art from FT Weekend, here.
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