Derek Stevens and Circa Combine Forces With A’s Stadium By Becoming Ballpark’s First Founding Sponsor Under Ten-Year Deal
By Alan Snel, LVSportsBiz.com Publisher-Writer
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — It’s easy to see how much Las Vegas hotel owner Derek Stevens loves baseball when he talks about the sport. The joy is in the voice of Stevens, who owns Circa hotel-casino in downtown Las Vegas and two other hotel-casinos in downtown.
The former Las Vegas 51s owner, who sold the minor league team to Howard Hughes Corporation for $20 million in May 2013, has made a rather financially beefy investment in the Major League Baseball team moving to the Las Vegas market in 2028.
Stevens signed a ten-year founding partner sponsorship with the MLB Athletics, which are building a $2 billion, domed, 33,000-fan stadium at the former Tropicana hotel-casino at the busiest intersection on the Strip. The A’s could sign up ten to 12 founding sponsors, with Stevens already a team sponsor with the team playing in West Sacramento while the stadium is built on the Strip.
The sponsorship is obviously worth tens of millions of dollars, especially when you consider Stevens’ Circa has 22 seats in a “Circa Dugout Club” next to a dugout and another 28 seats beyond the outfield fence in an area that Stevens dubbed, “Time of Your Life” seats. Stevens also controls four other seats in the stadium for a total of 54 Circa seats.
Stevens, a huge sports fan and sports betting business developer, also owns Circa Sports, which runs the world’s biggest sportsbook at Circa and other books around Southern Nevada and the country. Officially speaking, not only is Circa an official founding partner of the A’s, it’s the “Official Resort and Sportsbook of the Las Vegas Athletics” and the A’s ballpark.
A’s owner John Fisher and team president Marc Badain were on hand to announce the first A’s stadium founding sponsor at the team’s welcome center in the upscale UnCommons business/mixed use development in a growing southwest valley area off the 215 beltway curve.
Stevens remembered the days of Cashman Field, where the former 51s played in an aging venue in downtown. Cashman Field included metal bleacher-style seating.
He was effusive in his support for the A’s stadium, which is being built on a nine-acre footprint at the former 35-acre site of the Tropicana hotel at the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Tropicana Avenue. The A’s left Oakland for Las Vegas because Nevada state legislators approved a $380 million public subsidy deal to help the A’s build their stadium. The team is playing temporarily at a minor league stadium in West Sacramento, California from 2025-2027 while the stadium on the Strip is built.
Fisher said he was at the construction site this morning to see the third arch installed at the construction site.
Stevens has supported other sports teams in Las Vegas. In June 2017, for example, Stevens signed an early sponsorship deal with the then-first-year NHL Vegas Golden Knights to make his The D hotel-casino the downtown epicenter for Golden Knights watch parties and events, while Stevens also pledged $100,000 to the team’s foundation to help pay for youth hockey programs in the Las Vegas market nine years ago.
Stevens is a common sight in his seats behind a goal at VGK games at T-Mobile Arena and sat with Fisher at those seats last season. Stevens praised Fisher as an owner, while Fisher called Stevens, the “greatest sports fan of the world.”
Founding partnerships can cost several millions of dollars a year. For example, the NFL Las Vegas Raiders were in talks with the Southern Nevada Water Authority for a ten-year $30 million founding sponsorship for the Raiders-run Allegiant Stadium in 2019. The water authority, however, declined in 2020 to sign up for that Raiders sponsorship deal. Current A’s president Marc Badain was the Raiders team president in 2019 when the Southern Nevada Water Authority was wooed as a sponsor.
The biggest sponsor deal for the A’s will be the stadium’s naming rights.
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