Making Las Vegas a center of American sports makes a lot of sense. Sports betting is now broadly legal and immensely popular, and no city epitomizes the gambler’s paradise quite like Sin City. And Vegas is the quintessential live city, where being there in person is the whole point. Nobody really watches light-up water fountain shows on tape delay. At least I don’t think so — you know… I bet someone does.
Las Vegas will soon harbor five major American sports teams: the Raiders, the Golden Knights, the Aces, the Athletics and the (NBA team name here). This will take Vegas from having zero major teams as recently as 2016 to having a full house (pun extremely intended, arguably the most intended pun in history) in just over a decade. That growth was planned and profoundly intentional, as the winds of legalized sports betting took gambling from under the table and into the mesosphere. That’s higher than the stratosphere — we’re way past the stratosphere at this point.
Advertisement
Vegas has always been a destination for combat sports and major, one-off live events, and thus transitioning the city to be the great American sports boomtown feels like a worthy effort. To be sure, monetizing in-person experience has been the great achievement of Las Vegas, whatever the consumer wants that experience to be — a concert, a restaurant, blackjack at 3 a.m., aforementioned water fountain shows; there are a number of options. But as the resident Gen Z cultural critic for … the world, I’m here to cast some doubt on that.
Las Vegas is a bona fide gold, ruby and sapphire mine on paper for sports. It’s an in-person extravaganza with built-in gambling systems, massive hotel infrastructure and tourism investment like you can’t believe. And all that will certainly bring sports teams to Las Vegas, but will it keep them there?
Sports teams relocate when they no longer have a connection with the city or the fan base, thus becoming unable to finance improvements to stadiums or effectively exploit their brand for maximum profit. Las Vegas might struggle with the domestic fan base required to sustain these teams, especially since it imported both the Athletics and the Raiders which have significant fan bases … in Oakland (and Los Angeles). Those fans are probably not thrilled that Vegas jacked their teams.
It’s not that Vegas doesn’t have a major year-round population. Including Henderson and Paradise, the whole metro area is over 2 million people — plenty to sustain multiple teams. The question, instead, is will a historically sportsless population embrace such a dramatic shift in their city long term?
Advertisement
And then there’s Vegas’ main attraction: tourism, which has been waning from both a real and philosophical perspective. Trying to predict short-term market trends with tourism is not something I’m in the business of doing, but I can tell you that going to Las Vegas is not something young people like me necessarily see as the great trip to plan your year around.
Shockingly, I cannot speak for the attitude of my entire generation about Las Vegas. But I can speak for my own feeling and the opinion of my social circles, which might approach something we could loosely call “a sample.” I am from the East Coast, so physically getting myself and my to Las Vegas is a whole ordeal. I imagine if I were from Southern California it would be easier, but I am not, so we will go with this.
The appeal of Las Vegas that I have absorbed throughout my life is threefold: gambling, entertainment and spectacle. Vegas is, of course, a lot more than that, but those are the buzzwords that would get me on a plane. When I was a kid (that was pretty recently) Las Vegas was a fascinating world where gambling was legal — that alone piqued my interest.
Now, there is a casino in Everett, Massachusetts. They have shuttle buses there from every Celtics game and it’s all perfectly legal and above board. I can pull out my phone and open FanDuel and gamble on that very Celtics game completely legally. The concept that I would go 2,738 miles to do that seems pretty silly.
Advertisement
As an entertainment destination, Vegas still has some moxie. The Sphere is a unique enough concept that I would be interested in going to a concert there, but also the biggest artists my generation cares about tour all over the world — sure, if I wanted to go see U2 or Kenny Chesney or the Backstreet Boys, I could go do that. But how many Gen Zers want to do that?
Then there’s the spectacle — the strip, the lights, all the excess that makes Vegas such a tantalizing world in the mind of a 23-year-old. To that I would say it still exists, but man… traveling is expensive. There are a lot of places I could go with my 23-year-old income, but it doesn’t feel like Vegas is one of them. For a generation that is told every day that the housing market is out of control and their student loans will never go away and that finding a job is impossible, the concept of going to expensive-land seems crazy.
And it’s not even true that Las Vegas has to be that much more expensive than other destinations; it just feels like it is, and the fact that I needed to do seven minutes of research to determine that my preconceived notion of Las Vegas being so much more expensive than, say, New Orleans or New York, was wrong… is a huge problem for Vegas’ perception among young people.
I’m really not sure if Vegas’ sports investment will pay off long-term. Had all the teams appeared slowly and organically over a number of years, fomenting a real hometown fan base and identity, sure, and maybe the new NBA team can do that along with the Knights and Aces. But I have no idea if the Athletics or Raiders have Vegas staying power. And I’m not sure Vegas has the cultural staying power either.
Advertisement
It’s not just Gen Z that feels this shift. Bill Simmons, a Gen-X sports guy and probably the most public Vegas/sports media crossover event since… (you know what? I don’t have any other examples of that), devoted a whole podcast segment this September with Sean Fennessey and Chris Ryan to discuss Vegas’ tourism issue and what the city could be struggling with into the future. All I can say to that is… yeah, the things they said appealed to them when they were younger about Vegas do not necessarily appeal to me. It’s a different world out here, one that is far more digital and less in-person.
I’d probably have fun in Vegas, and I’ll certainly go at some point to check out some of these new sports teams with their bajillion dollar stadiums and presentations. But the fact that I have not planned a big friends’ trip to Vegas yet tells you what you need to know. The allure just hasn’t been strong enough.
