Clues To MLS Team In Las Vegas Might Be Found In Sunday’s Sold Out Gold Cup Soccer Match At Allegiant Stadium
By Alan Snel of LVSportsBiz.com
The NHL Golden Knights were born in Las Vegas in 2017. The NFL Raiders migrated to begin play here in 2020.
With this taste of the big leagues, giddy Las Vegas sports fans enjoy schmoozing about the MLB Oakland Athletics checking out Las Vegas while also negotiating with the city of Oakland about a ballpark. And they love chatting about the prospects of an NBA team playing at a world-class arena located between New York-New York and Park MGM on the Strip.
But those sports fans might be missing another professional sports league that likes the Las Vegas market.
Major League Soccer.
Las Vegas will be getting a strong taste of the power of soccer Sunday when Mexico and USA play an international game at the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium that sold out in 90 minutes. It’s the first sports event at the NFL stadium that is a sellout. UNLV’s football team played there Oct. 31, but only 2,000 fans were permitted in the building because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Concacaf Gold Cup championship game will attract super-intense soccer fans, who will pack the domed stadium. Most of the fans will be rooting for Mexico. Stadium workers will slide the tray with the grass field into the venue and 60,000 fans — COVID surge or not — will pass through the turnstiles. Under a new state indoor mask mandate, everyone inside the 65,000-seat venue will be required to mask up,
MLS will also be there.
The Las Vegas market and MLS have a history of flirting. In July 2019, Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman and MLS Commissioner Don Garber took a selfie together at the Bellagio to announce the “Leagues Cup” soccer event that brought together four MLS teams and four Liga MX clubs in an eight-team tournament that had the bracket winners facing each other at Sam Boyd Stadium in September 2019.
The city of Las Vegas unsuccessfully proposed using public money earmarked for its parks to help subsidize building a MLS stadium with a private developer in downtown Symphony Park in 2015.
More recently, the city has talked privately with another development group about rebuilding the Cashman Center area with a new soccer stadium along a section of Las Vegas Boulevard. But those negotiations have not yielded a deal. If the negotiations had been successful, the investor in that group would have purchased the minor league Las Vegas Lights soccer team and attempted to move that United Soccer League club to Major League Soccer.
The Lights founder, Brett Lashbook, used to work for MLS and deserves credit for launching the USL team in 2017. But now the team is not even based in Las Vegas. It’s an affiliate of LAFC and practices in Los Angeles. The Las Vegas connection is that it still plays its games at downtown Cashman Field.
Even Vegas Golden Knights owner Bill Foley confirmed more than a year ago that he was studying the business numbers of an MLS team in this market.
Keep in mind that MLS is allowing private equity financing to help fund teams — a business move that could have ramifications to create a potential MLS franchise in the Las Vegas market.
Plus, Allegiant Stadium needs programming.
Southern Nevada contributed a record $750 million in public dollars to help the Raiders build their palatial indoor sports palace, with the Raiders saying the stadium would host 46 events a year.
With an MLS team playing 17 home games, reaching the 46 events number at Allegiant Stadium is viable.
Raiders owner Mark Davis, who also owns the Las Vegas Aces, is emotionally invested in living in the Las Vegas market and needs events for the stadium that he controls.
Las Vegas has a sizable Latino population, plus an MLS team in this market could tap into the Latino demographic from Texas and the West, all the way to Southern California. It’s no secret that the majority of fans at Lights home games are local Latinos in Las Vegas. But an MLS team in Las Vegas playing at luxurious Allegiant Stadium would be a regional draw, too. The stadium can tarp off sections of the upper bowl and create MLS venue seating for 35,000 or 40,000.
Mexico vs USA on Sunday is an international soccer match drawing fans from across North America and could be a model for what Las Vegas could do with an MLS team by combining soccer’s global appeal with the international visitors among the 40 million strong who visit this market every year.
So don’t be surprised if Allegiant Stadium is home to more soccer matches down the road.
Las Vegas has two world-class sports venues — the Raiders stadium and T-Mobile Arena. In major league sports, it’s the presence of amenity-rich venues that decides whether teams call a market home or not.
A publicly-funded baseball park in metro Las Vegas for the Athletics? Good luck with that. I don’t see elected political, hotel industry or tourism leaders going out on a limb to designate public dollars for an MLB stadium.
But Sunday’s Mexico vs USA soccer game will offer clues to a potential MLS franchise at Allegiant Stadium. Don’t forget, MLS teams playing in NFL stadiums in Atlanta and Seattle are working out well. And memo to MLS: I don’t see anyone in city of Las Vegas, Clark County and even the state legislature looking to fork over public money for an MLS stadium.
Follow the money? Nice cliche, so sure.
I follow the stadiums. And the Las Vegas market has a beauty that’s open for business and that will host a monster soccer event Sunday.
