Local, global reach of Allegiant Stadium incalculable
The part many forget: Plans for a state-of-the art domed stadium in Las Vegas were created under the assumption that it wouldn’t necessarily house an NFL team. Not at first, anyway.
The venue was instead viewed as a way to increase tourism by hosting massive events and offering a new home for UNLV football. That was January of 2016. My goodness, how things have changed.
Allegiant Stadium will seat 65,000. That much is certain. But how much this new facility will mold the future of Las Vegas remains incalculable. Stadiums can destroy cities financially. They can also rescue them. This one just might redefine how others identify this city on a global map.
Las Vegas was a sports town long before the Raiders relocated from Oakland. A stadium like Allegiant just raises the bar.
“It’s the most magnificent stadium and exists in the entertainment capital of the world,” said Raiders owner Mark Davis. “It is a dream. My family’s dream. The sky is the limit as to what this could become.”
Tourism will help
New stadiums are more than concrete and glass and steel. They welcome all generations and cultures. The average stadium generates hundreds of millions of dollars per year, but one such as Allegiant Stadium is hardly commonplace given the city in which it resides. 
Las Vegas and its draw as a tourist destination could help the stadium become much more than just another beautiful venue that grabs its share of sports and A-list concerts. It could become a world-class entertainment option. While countless studies have suggested that stadiums don’t contribute to economic growth, they can change for the better the perception of a city.
Hosting a Super Bowl does that. So would a Final Four of the NCAA Tournament. So would an international soccer match. The Pro Bowl. The Las Vegas Bowl. The Pac-12 football championship game. Perhaps a College Football Playoff semifinal or championship. Monster Trucks. Corporate gatherings.
You have to get creative to keep drawing all those thousands of people.
What is often lost in the talk about the massive impact of having the NFL playing at Allegiant are those advantages UNLV might also receive. However long the odds — and they are substantial — any level of Power Five expansion that might consider the Rebels isn’t possible without such a home for football.
It’s true UNLV hasn’t won in forever and many doubt the importance — at least when it comes to building a program — of a stadium in which a team plays just six times a year. But again, perception matters. It’s totally on UNLV to prove being at Allegiant translates into something more than fancier locker rooms and suites larger than a walk-in closet.
“This is a very special market,” Chris Wright, facilities regional vice president at AEG Worldwide, told the Review-Journal at a Las Vegas Stadium Authority board meeting in July. “There’s a lot of interest. I regularly speak with touring managers, touring entities and large concert promoters in the market, and they’re very excited to have an opportunity to come to the entertainment capital of the world in a brand new stadium.” 
The final vote
It wasn’t the smoothest of beginnings back in Carson City nearly four years ago. But after five days of a special legislative session, Senate Bill 1 received exactly two-thirds majority support.
It produced a public-private partnership that would be funded in part by $750 million in Clark County hotel room taxes. It meant that a coalition had paved the way for a state-of-the-art stadium to be built and an NFL team to possibly one day make Las Vegas home. It meant that the town was about to change forever.
Shortly after the vote became official, then-UNLV president Len Jessup quoted from John F. Kennedy: We do things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard ….”
He didn’t know at the time such a venue would be named Allegiant Stadium and welcome the Las Vegas Raiders. Nobody did.
What we now know: A palace that brought a nearly $2 billion price tag will not only light up the Las Vegas skyline as the sun sets, but just might shape the city’s future in a manner it has never known.
Ed Graney is a Sigma Delta Chi Award winner for sports column writing and can be reached at egraney@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4618. He can be heard on “The Press Box,” ESPN Radio 100.9 FM and 1100 AM, from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. Monday through Friday. Follow @edgraney on Twitter.
