Las Vegas Is The Next City The Raiders Will Use For Leverage To Try And Get A New Stadium

For two decades Los Angeles has served as the NFL’s bogeyman, lurking just out of sight as an implicit threat to any city that refused to pay up for a new or renovated stadium. You better flash the cash, the NFL would threaten, or the Bills/Dolphins/Jaguars/Vikings/Colts are going to bolt for glamorous Los Angeles.

But now that the Rams and probably Chargers are moving to Los Angeles, the bogeyman is gone. So what’s an owner who is locked into a battle with his city over the cost of a new stadium to do? Get wined and dined by the Las Vegas elite, of course!

As first reported by Ralston Reports, Oakland Raiders owner Mark Davis will be in Las Vegas tomorrow to meet with Sheldon Adelson, the mega-billionaire owner of Las Vegas Sands and numerous casinos. According to a memo from UNLV President Len Jessup, there will be a big gathering on land that UNLV recently bought:

I have been notified that the Las Vegas Sands plans to publicly announce its support for a new special events stadium in Southern Nevada and they believe the 42 acres of land on Tropicana Avenue that UNLV Recently purchased is a prime location.

Correspondingly, the Sands leadership team let us know that officials from the Oakland Raiders are scheduled to travel to Las Vegas and tour locations around the valley for a potential new home and they have asked us to meet them at our 42-acre site on Friday morning to answer questions about that site.

According to the , Sands is proposing to build a billion dollar, 65,000 seat domed stadium on the site to house UNLV’s football team, that will be ready for any potential NFL team.

And if Las Vegas doesn’t work out for the Raiders, Davis has previously visited San Antonio, whose officials have expressed interest in housing the team. Los Angeles might be off the table, but one way or another—whether it’s Oakland, Las Vegas, San Antonio, or a mystery city—somebody will build the Raiders a stadium. The publicly-funded stadium scam will continue unabated.

Photo via Getty

E-mail: [email protected] | PGP key + fingerprint | DM: @kevinmdraper