Las Vegas and the NFL can make more money, and fans can have more fun by borrowing a business model invented in the Bay Area.
The Oakland Raiders are on the cusp of moving to Las Vegas, where civic leaders just approved $750 million of public money towards building a $1.9 billion new stadium to house them.
Do you want to tell them you're moving their team?
It’s a scenario as old as the NFL itself. A franchise owner becomes envious of his fellow billionaires’ shiny new stadiums. So, he wants his franchise’s home city to pony up public money for a new stadium. Otherwise…well, he might have no choice but to move their beloved franchise to a different city. And of course, there’s always another city more than willing to play the role of mistress, eager to break up the current marriage for their own benefit. Until of course, their new stadium starts aging. Then, that owner’s roving eyes start to wander again.
But what if moving the Raiders, or any other team, to Las Vegas wasn’t the only way you could have NFL games there? Why go through all the expense and risk involved in building a stadium and get only eight home games a year out of it? If both Las Vegas and the NFL took a moment to re-think their business models, they might realize they could apply the sharing/platform model so popular here in startup-land to the business of hosting and presenting NFL games. It would also represent enough of a departure for both of them to re-vitalize the growth they both seek.
It’s already an over-used new-economy riff to point out that Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no taxis. AirBnB owns no hotel rooms. Facebook creates no content. And Las Vegas? Think about it: its largest industry is hosting events for other industries. Of course Las Vegas is a genuine city with schools and supermarkets and sports fans, but we all know Las Vegas isn’t just another population center. It’s Vegas. So why should the NFL, and Las Vegas itself, forget that and simply move an existing franchise there as if it were any other, you know, normal city?
Las Vegas, in the vernacular of Silicon Valley, is indeed a platform play. The Vegas Strip’s sense of place is that is has no sense of place. Since it’s located on a blank slate of desert, it can turn itself into any other place you want, just like a movie studio soundstage. That applies to both wildly themed resorts for tourists, and the acres of configurable convention space for businesses. Other cities can do pieces of what Las Vegas can do, but only Vegas can do all of it bigger, louder, with less taste, more fun, no shame, all at the same time.
So instead of moving a single franchise to Las Vegas permanently, Las Vegas should offer Pro-Football-As-A-Service (PFAAS), hosting a weekly game in their new stadium between all the other teams in the league. Las Vegas wouldn't have a home team, but it would be the home of a weekly event, the place where every NFL weekend begins.
All at once, this could expand the revenue base of the NFL, provide Las Vegas with twice as many “home games” as having their own team (and all the revenue and jobs that go along with them), and provide the entire resort, gambling, airline, media broadcast, and convention industries with a brand new, yet proven product to sell.
It's not like the NFL and Las Vegas are strangers or anything...
Despite its position as the powerhouse of pro sports powerhouses, the NFL still wants to grow much bigger. That was true well before the revelation of this season’s surprising decline in TV ratings, which probably has more to do with a continually declining, dishwater product than from the competition from the Presidential election cycle.
To gain the new revenue they seek, (their goal is to increase revenue from about $13 billion in 2015 to $25 billion by 2027) the NFL has long wanted to expand the regular season from its current 16 games to 18 games. This is of course an exercise in greed at the expense of player safety, as playing football is treacherous enough as it is. But there’s an incorrect assumption buried into that move from 16 to 18 games: the regular season doesn’t need to have an even number of games, which is presumably so that each team can play an equal number of home and away games.
Instead, they should move to a 17 game season (or, if they were really smart, reduce it to 15 games and create a far more compelling season), with the “odd” extra game being played on neutral turf in Las Vegas, every week. That way, every team in the league would still have its eight home games and eight away games, plus the “Vegas Game,” in the new stadium at the South end of The Strip.
That weekly game would happen on Saturday nights in primetime, and would replace the current incredibly annoying and ill-conceived Thursday night games on the weekly schedule. Moving the game to Saturday does more than create a more compact rhythm to the NFL week, with games starting and ending in primetime from Saturday night, through the usual Sunday day games and primetime game, and finishing with the venerable Monday Night Football. It also creates a new weekend vacation destination product for Las Vegas, the NFL, and every other travel, media, and advertising partner within their massive ecosystem.
This is not a completely original idea. The NFL has already floated the idea of a 17-game season, but with the additional game being played in other countries. They already play several games a year in London (costing half those teams a home date), and have also been in Mexico City. But nobody really likes these games. If you’re going to have a neutral site game, why not put it in the one city in the United States most football fans like to visit anyway?
Rare video of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell explaining his strong opposition to gambling on NFL games.
A Saturday night game in Vegas, once per season for every team in the league, would create a new tradition for football fans. Fans of every team in the country would pencil in an annual two or three-day weekend jaunt to Vegas to see their team play the Vegas Game, and have a great time before and after the game. Plus, you can bet legally on your own bumbling team while you're there. Officially, the NFL pretends to want to avoid being so close to something as unwholesome as gambling, but they know how interwoven it is in the fan experience, and how dependent their entire business is on the interest and money it generates.
With the fall NFL schedule being announced in April each year, there would be plenty of time for airlines to plan dedicated charter flights and complete vacation packages for fans of, say, Denver and Washington to head directly to Vegas starting on Friday morning, and continue through to late Saturday afternoon, right up until kickoff. Return flights back home could start the next morning, through the end of the Monday Night Football telecast. But few fans would want to head back right away, especially if it’s mid-November and you’re from Buffalo.
In between arrival and departure, there’s a whole world of fun to be had, reckless decisions to be made, and revenue to be collected. The new stadium could be designed with permanent, custom-catered tailgating areas for pre-game gluttony and celebration. Instead of private pool cabanas, there would be private tailgating camps with buffets and bars. Since it’s Saturday, all the daytime NCAA football games would be shown on massive outdoor screens. Advertisers would have their own pavilions for product sampling, sponsored concerts, and competitions between rival fan groups.
The following Sunday morning would bring the rest of the NFL schedule on TV. And of course, all the sports books in the casinos would generate massive crowds. So much so, there might need to be new annexes of each resort’s sports book to handle the fans. Given the profitability of sports gambling, I imagine they could get construction financing for that.
And for the meeting and convention business? It’s a natural match. Much of the impetus to build bigger and better stadiums is to boost the revenue generated by selling luxury boxes to corporations who want to entertain clients. Las Vegas could build hybrid luxury box/meeting space suites into the new stadium plan, each with a view of the game. That would provide an incentive for trade shows to extend their meetings into the weekend after the main conference is over, which of course drives more hotel and restaurant business.
Is it a risky idea? Sure it is, but the NFL could see the extra game as the equivalent of gambling with “house money”, which as Las Vegas knows, is the tactic for gambling when you’re already ahead on your bets, so you can afford to take larger risks that carry much larger payoffs.
Las Vegas has some experience in profitably staging high-profile violent clashes between athletes. What if they did it once a week, instead of every few years?
While local Las Vegas sports fans might prefer to have a team of their own, they could still have the opportunity to see more live football than anyone else in the country. The NFL could even do the unthinkable and be kind to the local fan base by offering discounted tickets to any Nevada resident, in much the same way Disneyland makes most of its money by offering discounted admission for Los Angeles residents. Forty million annual Las Vegas visitors ought to be able to account for the remaining seats.
And if it doesn’t work? Well then, the stadium will already be built, and then Las Vegas becomes the new “ransom city” for the NFL. That’s the role Los Angeles has played for the past 20 years. During that time, Los Angeles, despite being the second-largest media market in the country, had no NFL team. Both the Rams and the Raiders had left. So every time an NFL owner wanted a new stadium and was facing resistance to public funding from his home city, he could always wave the threat of moving the team to the vacant Los Angeles market. Over and over again, that hostage-taking approach worked.
Now that the Rams have returned to Los Angeles (and the San Diego Chargers might be next), Las Vegas would fill that role, keeping all the other existing NFL cities on notice. That’s another thing the NFL and Las Vegas have in common: they both appreciate the advantages of a stacked deck.
The NFL’s dominance among sports leagues and its anti-trust exemption remain unchallenged, and the entire Las Vegas strip is built on the inevitability of the House Advantage. Yet, both their customer bases are fine with that, because there’s really nothing else like either one of them. Imagine what they could create together, if both of them had the imagination, skill, and guts to disrupt themselves.