By ALAN SNEL
LVSportsBiz.com
You won’t find another person in Las Vegas who is more animated and bullish about Sin City’s professional sports industry than Jeremy Aguero, a fourth-generation local and UNLV-educated lawyer who comes to every one of his speaking engagements armed with a bushel of numbers and slides.
The man who wrote the Raiders stadium law and is the stadium board consultant gets so worked up when talking about Las Vegas’ sports industry that he’s kind of like Conor McGregor, the Tasmanian Devil, a tent revival preacher and the local chamber of commerce president all wrapped up in one.
Aguero was in postseason form when he talked to a national group of women sports and event marketing leaders at the South Point hotel-casino Wednesday, when he gushed about Las Vegas and the future of big-time sports here. If I was the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority’s marketing chief, Cathy Tull, who also spoke that night, she might want to clone Aguero and send a bunch of Agueros around the country to talk up Las Vegas’ sports future and how people should come here to buy lots of hotel room stays.
Aguero talked up the Golden Knights; Raiders and their $1.8 billion stadium; WNBA las Vegas Aces (avg attendance 5,200); USL Las Vegas Lights (avg attendance 7,239); Triple A 51s that will be re-branded for their new $150 million ballpark. He mentioned the NBA and Major League Baseball are also “sniffing around” Las Vegas. That’s all on top of UFC, National Finals Rodeo, NBA Summer League, PGA Shriners golf event, two NASCAR weekends and UNLV sports.
While Southern Nevada will raise more than $1 billion in room fee revenues during the next 30 years to give the Raiders $750 million for their stadium construction, Aguero told the 25-year-old Women in Sports and Events (WISE) group that he believed the Raiders stadium will generate $235 million in new spending every year (though, he didn’t have a slide to explain exactly how.)
For all of Aguero’s rosy views on the future of Las Vegas sports, there was one mega event that he wondered whether it would pay for Las Vegas to actually host it in the new 65,000-seat, domed Raiders stadium set to open in late July 2020 on the west side of Interstate 15, across the highway from Mandalay Bay hotel-casino.
Las Vegas and its 150,000 hotel rooms and 300,000 hospitality workers could easily host a Super Bowl. But would it pay to have a Super Bowl in Las Vegas on the first Sunday in February, when hotel rooms are typically filled to near capacity?
Aguero told the group that Super Bowl 52 in Minneapolis drew 175,000 visitors for Super Bowl weekend in February. And then he delivered the punch line that there were 311,000 visitors in Las Vegas the same weekend.
A sports event committee created by Gov. Brian Sandoval recently tackled this same question; that is, would Las Vegas financially benefit from hosting a Super Bowl? Just about every NFL city would welcome a Super Bowl because of the corporate spending on parties and events during the week leading up to the big game and the tourists who flock to the host city.
But Las Vegas has to weigh the pros and cons and figure out would a Super Bowl attract visitors who would simply displace tourists who would already be here anyway? How much corporate event spending would be needed during the week before the Super Bowl to justify Las Vegas’ host costs? Would hotel room rates increase enough and generate enough hotel revenues to justify creating a host committee that would be expected to have a budget of $12 million-$50 million for a Super Bowl, besides other contributions?
LVSportsBiz.com chatted with Aguero, who noted the numbers would have to be crunched to determine whether a Super Bowl is worth it for Las Vegas.
“What is the value of the proposition? If the hotel properties are already full, would you be displacing visitors already at the hotel,?” Aguero asked.
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It’s too early to tell whether a Super Bowl would be an economic boon for Southern Nevada.
But LVSportsBiz.com has another football event idea for the new Raiders stadium. How about the NFL designating the new palatial venue in Las Vegas as the official home for Monday Night Football? Under this plan, the two teams could bring their fan contingents every week and play a game on a day of the week that is sometimes a slow day for hotels in Las Vegas.
The Raiders stadium and Las Vegas tourism leaders have already dropped out of trying to host the World Cup in 2026 after FIFA, soccer’s sanctioning body, asked for too much from the Las Vegas hospitality industry.
Las Vegas is probably the only market in the country that has to evaluate the economic worth of hosting a Super Bowl because the market already has so many visitors in town that time of year.
The Southern Nevada Sporting Event Committee, which meets 1 p.m. Sept. 24 at Las Vegas City Council chambers, is the panel tasked with figuring out good events for the Raiders stadium. And hosting the Super Bowl is still a vexing question for the committee.
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