Raiders, Beyonce boost Allegiant Stadium attendance since opening

Although Oakland Athletics-related items weren’t on the agenda for Thursday’s Las Vegas Stadium Authority Board of Directors meeting, work with MLB remains ongoing.

Stadium authority chariman Steve Hill said A’s items relating to the team’s planned $1.5 billion ballpark are expected to be heard during the next scheduled meeting in February or March.

“Obviously the agenda today is about the Raiders; we are continuing to have conversations with the A’s,” Hill said. “Those conversations are going well. We anticipate bringing back the community benefits agreement, the lease agreement and potentially the first draft of the non-relocation agreement at our next board meeting … The development agreement will not be introduced at our next board meeting.”

Those agreements all must be in place ahead of the up to $380 million in public funding, earmarked last summer by Senate Bill 1, would be made available and before construction could begin on the planned 33,000-seat ballpark. Planned to be built on 9 acres at the 35-acre Tropicana hotel site, the hope is for construction to get underway in early 2025, with completion set for early 2028.

Stadium events

Events at Allegiant Stadium have drawn 3.6 million people since mid-2021 when fans were first allowed inside the $2 billion facility.

The tally includes events between 2021 and September tracked by the stadium authority.

In that time at the 62,500-seat stadium, 22 Raiders home games lead the way with 1.2 million attendees. There have been 26 concerts that drew more than 1.1 million fans, and 24 other large ticketed events such as one-off soccer matches and the NFL Pro Bowl drawing 828,159 and 15 UNLV football games bringing in 212,739 people, stadium authority data shows. Included in the total are 373 smaller private events which amassed 210,638 since the stadium has been open.

During the most recent attendance quarterly report, which covers July through September, 428,727 fans attended events at the stadium.

The most attended event over that span was the Sept. 24 Raiders versus Pittsburgh Steelers game that saw 58,964 fans. Of those, 64 percent of attendees were from out of town. Among them, 93 percent said the game was their main reason to travel. It should be no surprise that the game was the fifth best-selling event last year on StubHub.

The Aug. 13 Raiders preseason game against the San Francisco 49ers was the second-highest attended event in the third quarter at 54,369 fans. About 45 percent of attendees at that game were visitors, according to stadium authority data.

An Aug. 26 Beyonce concert was the third most-attended event and saw the highest number of out-of-state attendees during the quarter with 66 percent of the 44,702 fans not being from Las Vegas.

The stadium is outpacing the amount of incremental visitors, or those whose main reason for traveling to Las Vegas was for an event at Allegiant Stadium, during its first few years in operation, Hill said.

“When we modeled Allegiant Stadium we modeled 450,000 incremental visitors (per year),” Hill said. “In just this quarter (third of 2023) … it’s about 190,000 incremental visitors in that quarter. So four quarters of that and you can see why we’re saying Allegiant Stadium has way out performed what was originally modeled. And what was originally modeled we felt was well worth the investment of the $750 million to make the stadium happen.”

Contact Mick Akers at makers@reviewjournal.com or 702-387-2920. Follow @mickakers on X.