Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast from Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas attracted more than 123 million viewers, per Nielsen, a simply breathtaking figure given how television audiences have fragmented in the streaming era. As a point of comparison, the season finale of “Succession,” a massive hit in the world of dramatic entertainment, attracted just 2.9 million contemporaneous viewers last year. That’s less than 3% of the Super Bowl viewership.
Sure, there was the unique Taylor Swift factor in play on Sunday. But there can be no doubt that sports, especially football, have not only retained their hold on Americans but greatly expanded it. It’s not just the NFL, either: Close to 20 million viewers watched Michigan play Ohio State last fall.
Which brings us to Las Vegas, a city that brilliantly reinvents itself with each generation. Back in the day, Vegas was all about gambling, with live entertainment from the likes of the Rat Pack as the designated net to catch gamblers. Then Vegas figured out it could make money on both ends, setting up musical “residencies” with high-priced tickets that not only fed the casinos with gamblers but also furnished plenty of revenue to the city on their own.
But sports was never part of its equation. Sports? That was for cities like Chicago.
Why not Vegas? For one thing, for decades the major sports leagues avoided gambling like the plague, fearing the corruption of their players, staffers and thus their games. Not many years ago, the NFL wouldn’t even let Vegas advertise on its telecasts and the league tried to stop Super Bowl parties at casinos. For another, the teams’ owners thought they’d struggle to attract an audience in a city defined by entertainment. For a third, Vegas did not have any facilities that could house major-league sports.
It does now. America and the world saw the capabilities of a brand-new stadium named after a relatively obscure budget airline that sure as heck got some major bang on Sunday for its sponsorship buck. As did the whole city.
Incredibly, it was not until 2017 that the National Hockey League’s Golden Knights began playing in the desert, becoming the first resident major league team in Vegas history. The Las Vegas Raiders of the National Football League followed in 2020, once the city had helped Allegiant Stadium rearrange the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. And even Formula One roared down the strip this year; tellingly, many of the live Vegas shows had to cancel or reschedule since their performers could not get past the barriers. Even as locals kvetched, Vegas decided that was a price worth paying. It’s a long-term contract.
Why the change? Simple. It’s due to the sudden, massive rise in sports betting.
Once smoky afterthoughts pushed to the side, the sports books of Vegas now are casino centerpieces, benefiting from the sports leagues having lost their moral compunctions over gambling. Also key is the rise in technology and artificial intelligence that make Vegas oddsmakers, even in obscure college basketball games, more precise than ever. That’s just great for the house, even as twitchy-fingered gamblers are offered more proposition bets than ever.
Sports fans now flock to Vegas in a way that never happened before, not just to gamble but, as we saw on Sunday as Vegas partied (and made money) all week, to immerse themselves in sports culture. In the desert.
You might say that Vegas is eating the sports lunch of old-school cities like Chicago.
The advent of sports betting also helps explain the poor performance to date of the new (temporary) Chicago casino. As many smart people warned, it faces tough competition from online sports wagering, as young people clearly prefer betting on games to feeding a slot machine. Even live entertainment and on-site hotel rooms won’t fully fix that, especially once facilities like the new Draft Kings salon at Wrigley Field get fully up and running.
Chicago waited too long to build its casino; it now has to face diminished possibilities. The cash cow local pols were counting on looks more right now like a cash calf.
The game has also changed when it comes to new sports facilities, such as the Chicago White Sox plan to build a new stadium on the plot of land known as The 78 and the Chicago Bears’ renewed interest in building a new stadium in the city whose name the team bears. We promise to return in coming days and weeks to the thorny details of who should pay for what here, and which project is the better option of the two for Chicago. But there can be no question anymore that major cities hoping to draw visitors and benefit economically have to engage in a new way with professional sports. Further, editorial boards like this one, long rightly resistant to public money being used for these projects, will have to wrestle with some new realities.
Zoom has hurt the convention business. Lower-cost hubs have hurt O’Hare International Airport. Online shopping has dealt a serious blow to Michigan Avenue. Higher costs, especially in this city, are causing many restaurants to struggle. Even live entertainment faces tough competition from streaming and audience worries about downtown crime.
Watching sports live has not only been largely immune from these trends but has benefited from them, thanks to its person-to-person thrills, its relative unpredictability (unless you are an oddsmaker) and, most importantly in our view, the contrast it offers from the flat screens that now dominate our lives. The NCAA has never more closely resembled the NFL and, of course, college players are more and more like baby pros. This is a global trend, of course, visible with new soccer stadiums in Europe, huge valuations of top teams and will be writ large this summer with the Paris Olympics.
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Chicago mostly has lost out here: no Olympics, despite our best efforts, no upcoming World Cup games, nowhere to host a Super Bowl. Some fans would add cheap owners to that list.
But while the business language of competitiveness often seems lost on Chicago’s City Hall, they sure as heck get it in Las Vegas, where you most likely watched the massive rewards of civic reinvention just this past Sunday.