Raiders Stadium Update: Making of a Sports Palace

By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com

They grow up so fast these days.

Sports venues — domed stadiums and baseball parks.

Las Vegas is a hot sports market because of its sports palaces — T-Mobile Arena in 2016, Las Vegas Ballpark in 2019 and now the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium scheduled to open in four months.

It was easy to keep an eye on this $1.97 billion project, which includes $1.4 billion for the building construction of the domed, 65,000-seat venue on 62.5 acres on the west side of Interstate 15 across from Mandalay Bay. The balance of the overall project budget went for expenses like professional costs, design expenditures, land acquisitions and venue supplies. Southern Nevada is giving $750 million in public money toward the stadium’s construction. Here’s the initial project budget when it was $1.8 billion before it increased to $1.97 billion.

 

I monitored the stadium construction’s progress via bicycle and bike rides since 2017, making weekly pit stops along Polaris Avenue, Hacienda Avenue and Dean Martin Drive to snap photos from several vantage points. I was hardly the only person interested in photographing the developing palatial sports palace.

Here are a Top 10 photo display showing the sequence of a growing stadium, which is still under construction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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  1. Early days

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2. At the beginning

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3. Piecing together the giant erector set

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4. Crane City

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5. Connected

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6. Progress

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7. The field

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8. Darth Vader look emerges

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9. Here it comes

 

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10. Name installed

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Stay safe.

Be healthy.

Thank you health personnel.

Look for more bicyclists and walkers when you drive.

Confirmed COVID-19 cases in Nevada: 1,742; in Clark County: 1,418 — COVID-19 deaths in Nevada: 46; in Clark County: 41 — Total COVID-19 cases in U.S.: 321,762; total COVID-19 deaths in U.S.: 9,180.

 


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Alan Snel

Alan Snel brings decades of sports-business reporting experience to LVSportsBiz.com. Snel covered the business side of sports for the South Florida (Fort Lauderdale) Sun-Sentinel, the Tampa Tribune and Las Vegas Review-Journal. As a city hall beat reporter, Snel also covered stadium deals in Denver and Seattle. In 2000, Snel launched a sport-business website for FoxSports.com called FoxSportsBiz.com. After reporting sports-business for the RJ, Snel wrote hard-hitting stories on the Raiders stadium for the Desert Companion magazine in Las Vegas and The Nevada Independent. Snel is also one of the top bicycle advocates in the country.