LVSportsBiz Confidential: Las Vegas Grand Prix Can Learn Community Relations Lessons From NFL, Super Bowl 58 In Las Vegas

By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer

On a cold, rainy, damp Monday in Las Vegas, we roll out a buffet of sports-business news items for our readers.

The National Football League is getting a rather sweet deal for Super Bowl 58 in Las Vegas, where the public tourism agency approved $40 million to host the game while the Las Vegas Super Bowl Host Committee is charged with raising another $20 million to play host.

In return, the NFL provides an assortment of nice PR photo-opp events like tree plantings at local parks, business networking forums and sports equipment/school supply donation sessions.

 

It’s a lesson that Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix should learn. The car race in November received 3.8 miles of free roads, including the Strip, from Clark County and staged very few community events. The race created ill will between F1 and Las Vegas and resulted in the Las Vegas Grand Prix hiring former Las Vegas City Manager Betsy Fretwell to try and clean up the community relations mess. Fretwell has already met Las Vegas business owners hurt by the Nov. 18 race, while the NFL is holding tree plantings to say thanks to Las Vegas for hosting the Super Bowl.

F1, take notes from Super Bowl 58 and the community events related to the NFL event. The high-profile car race has a lot of community relations lessons to learn.

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The Athletics want to build a baseball stadium on the Strip, but the MLB team needs a temporary ballpark to play while the stadium at the Tropicana hotel-casino site is built for 2028. So A’s execs made visits to baseball parks in Sacramento and Salt Lake City because the team needs a place to play in 2025, 2026 and 2027 after its lease expires at the Coliseum in Oakland in 2024.

The traveling road show seems strange to baseball commentator Ken Rosenthal, who offered these thoughts that roasted the Athletics and Major League Baseball:

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The Sphere, which is scheduled to host some sports events in 2024 like the NHL Draft and a UFC fight show, has hired a new business head.

The Sphere announced that Jennifer Koester will join the company as “President, Sphere Business Operations,” effective Feb 5.

In this new position, Koester will leads strategy and execution of all business aspects of Sphere, which opened in Las Vegas in Sept 2023.

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In esports news, the HyperX Arena Las Vegas, in collaboration with parent company Allied Esports, has donated gaming equipment to launch UNLV’s first esports lounge, called the Tonopah Esports Lounge. There’s a ribbon-cutting event for the esports lounge Wednesday at the UNLV campus.

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