When Las Vegas-bound Major League Baseball team the Athletics hired Marc Badain as the club’s new president on March 6, it was hailed as a natural and savvy choice. After all, Badain had served as team president and in other roles for the Las Vegas Raiders for years, and played a crucial role in the NFL team’s relocation from Oakland and the construction of Allegiant Stadium.
A minor but not insignificant detail from that announcement was the company Badain was leaving to join the A’s, the Oak View Group. A sports and live entertainment firm that specializes in developing and managing arena-sized venues, Oak View is three years into a multi-billion dollar project to create another arena in Las Vegas, designed to host a potential NBA expansion team.
The A’s stadium, at an estimated cost of $1.75 billion, has yet to begin construction—groundbreaking should happen sometime in this second quarter of the year—and already, there are plans for a pro basketball arena, too?
Not exactly. Try two basketball arenas. Last April, real estate developer LVXP announced its plans for an entertainment and sports arena on the 27-acre north Strip site that once contained the Wet ‘n’ Wild waterpark, replacing a similar project that failed to find financing. Clark County Commission chair Tick Segerblom called it “a well-conceived project that has the potential to transform a valuable undeveloped land parcel into a highly productive destination that contributes meaningful long-term value to the community and visitors alike.”
All this fast-paced, forward-looking development has become par for the course for Las Vegas. In the spring of 2017, months before the Vegas Golden Knights played their first game at the year-old T-Mobile Arena, the Raiders had already announced their departure from Oakland and started planning their new Vegas stadium. It feels like community buzz around more professional sports and more arenas and stadiums hasn’t let up since.
A rendering of the Athletics’ Las Vegas Strip stadium
And why would it? Allegiant Stadium has hosted myriad mega-events beyond Raiders and UNLV football, including a Super Bowl, the Pac-12 Championship football game, the NFL Pro Bowl and the CONCACAF Nations League, not to mention dozens of huge touring concert events from the likes of the Rolling Stones and Taylor Swift.
The economic impact of the Vegas sports boom has been a fast-moving phenomenon, so specific and intriguing that the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER)and Sports Innovation Institute have created a tracking tool, the Southern Nevada Sports Economy Data Dashboard, to serve as an evolving research document.
“I think we predicted it and expected it within the traditional drivers of the economy, leisure and hospitality,” says CBER director Andrew Woods of the sports economy surge. “Where we’ve been surprised is the spillover effect into other industries or amateur sports. For example, the number of small businesses in sports instruction, those establishments alone increased 160% over the last 10 years.
“It spills over to members of the community who want to pick up those sports. You see that
at the [school] level where some of the most popular sports are girls flag football and amateur youth hockey.”
Certainly the culture of sports is growing and changing in Las Vegas as teams and venues join the community, and the dashboard has plenty of information about that. But its findings on the sports economy are particularly resonant, and seem to support the Field of Dreams theory: If we build it, they will come.
In this case, “they” would be sports fans, Las Vegas visitors, and their dollars.
Since Allegiant’s completion, total employment has nearly doubled within a half-mile radius of the stadium, and wages have increased by 12%. Local employment in the promotion of arts, sports and similar activities has grown from fewer than 300 jobs a decade ago to over 1,800 in 2022.
One of the dashboard’s most compelling figures is one all too familiar for Raiders fans: Approximately 60% of visitors attending sporting events at Allegiant Stadium are from out of town.
“When it comes to stadiums hosting these major league events, they’re not just simply there, as in other cities, as entertainment for locals. They’re also there to drive our economy,” Woods says. “Las Vegas is better positioned than other cities to capitalize on the benefits of these venues because the economy is driven by tourism.”
The Athletics opened their 2025 season last month in the team’s temporary home at Sutter Health Park in Sacramento, California. The A’s are planning to play there for the next three years before settling on the Strip for the 2028 season.
Last week, the Clark County Commission approved the creation of a sports and entertainment improvement district around the new ballpark to raise millions of dollars for the bonds the county and state will use to raise the public funding portion of the ballpark, which could be up to $380 million. The public funding was approved by the state legislature in 2023.
The MLB season is a long one, 162 games played over six months. Ticket prices, the quality of the stadium experience and the Athletics’ success on the field will figure into how baseball in Vegas plays out. But attracting both locals and Vegas visitors to the ballpark will be essential.
And will there be a saturation point for pro sports experiences in Las Vegas? Will fewer fans attend VGK games in favor of Athletics or even NBA games in the future?
“We don’t have the answers, but at the end of the day, we’re building these things to fill them up,” Woods says. “There’s a different dynamic with different teams. The economics are different between Allegiant and T-Mobile.
“It will be interesting to see if pro basketball and baseball ... how much economic support they have from out of town. Both play a lot of games, so I’ll be curious to see how that pans out.”
Oak View Group originally earmarked a site south of the Strip at Blue Diamond Road for its $10 billion arena and resort project, but has moved away from that location. Officials have stated the project will not require public money. In contrast, the LVXP project has a notable site—close to the Las Vegas Convention Center and Fontainebleau resort—but has not released information about financing.
NBA officials have not confirmed plans for expansion, although the recent lucrative sale of the Boston Celtics for $6.1 billion seems like a powerful motivating force for the league to do so.
Las Vegas may not need either arena project to host an NBA team. T-Mobile Arena was built to pro basketball specifications, and last year, Golden Knights owner Bill Foley said he’d be interested in renovating the arena to attract a basketball team. (MGM Resorts International operates T-Mobile and company officials declined to comment for this story.)
In a city that’s constantly reinventing itself and has no qualms about destroying old building to make way for shiny new ones, it’s hard to believe an older arena or stadium would be worth heavy reinvestment. The former home of UNLV football and countless sports and music events, Sam Boyd Stadium on the east side no longer hosts events and has been sold to the county (although the purchase hasn’t closed yet). A county spokesperson said future plans for the stadium and surrounding land “remain under consideration and have yet to be determined.”
Cashman Field, home to Las Vegas’ minor league baseball team for decades and the current headquarters of the Las Vegas Lights soccer team in the United Soccer League, was recently sold at auction by the City of Las Vegas to national homebuilder Lennar.
The Lights’ lease should allow the team to play there through 2026, but it’s expected the land will be used for housing.
These venues laid the foundation for Vegas today. Sam Boyd Stadium opened in 1971 and was the home field for UNLV football for 49 seasons. Cashman opened in 1983 and baseball bloomed in Las Vegas, leading to the opening of the Las Vegas Ballpark in Downtown Summerlin and eventually to the Athletics’ move.
And the Thomas & Mack Center, also arriving in 1983 and renovated in 2015, built a love for basketball in Las Vegas with the iconic Runnin’ Rebels teams of the ’80s and ’90s and some memorable NBA games as well.
With such a unique sports history, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to bet against Vegas continuing to develop and build on those traditions. A saturation point may not exist.
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