Ever since Alameda County slammed the brakes on its participation in the Oakland A’s planned stadium project last week, there’s been mostly quiet from the A’s front office about how the team owners plan to proceed either there or on their “parallel path” of relocating to Las Vegas. So it’s been left to the nation’s sportswriters to conduct independent investigations. How’d they do? Let’s find out!
- Mick Akers of the Las Vegas Review-Journal set out to answer the question “Is there a limit to the number of pro sports teams Vegas can support?”, which is a legitimate one, since Vegas would be easily the smallest U.S. media market with three Big Four sports teams if MLB joined the Raiders and Golden Knights there. (Second-smallest: Milwaukee, if you count the Green Bay Packers as part of that market; Pittsburgh, if you don’t.) This is something that’s been studied a fair bit in the past, including in repeated analyses by American City Business Journals and other business publications. (Vegas was deemed ripe for sports expansion then, but also didn’t have the NHL or NFL at the time.) Akers, however, skipped right past any fancy math about per-capita income or anything and instead talked solely to people with a vested interest around expanding pro sports in Vegas: Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill, Gov. Steve Sisolak, Clark County Commissioner Michael Naft, Las Vegas-based Allegiant Air chief marketing officer Scott DeAngelo, and Raiders owner Mark Davis, most of whom responded with variations on “Sure, hell yeah!” — with the one exception, Davis, saying of a potential baseball team, “I think people will go. I just don’t know how many.”
- Rickeyblog proprietor Alex Espinoza spent a week wandering around the greater Vegas area for SF Gate in hopes of finding someone who would talk to him about the A’s plans there and whether they’re real or a bluff, only to get stonewalled at every turn. (Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman: “We have had great discussions with the A’s management and we look forward to future talks with the team to showcase the advantages of moving to Southern Nevada.” City of Henderson spokesperson: Talks with the A’s are “broad and exploratory in nature.” You get the idea.) Instead, Espinoza took to visiting the various sites that A’s president Dave Kaval has been kicking the tires on, finding a whole lot of desert, then finally landing an interview with none other than Akers, who said that while he was initially “skeptical” that the A’s were serious, now he thinks that “the longer this drags out, the more real it becomes,” because “they’re meeting with all the right people out here.” Then he reached sports marketing consultant Jeremy Aguero of Applied Analysis, who may or may not be working for the A’s on studies of the Vegas market, and when asked if the area could support 81 games a year of baseball vs. 41 of hockey or eight of football, replied unhelpfully, “That’s really hard to say.” Espinoza was left concluding that an A’s-to-Vegas move is “more of a fallback plan, at least for now, than a ‘parallel path,'” since at least Oakland is a proven market with an existing stadium and a new-stadium plan in place, whereas Las Vegas is still a question mark in all those areas.
None of that really sheds much light on anything, unfortunately: As I noted last time we discussed this in-depth back in June, sports execs bluffing about a move sound exactly the same as those who are serious about one — and sometimes even the execs themselves haven’t decided how serious they are, since they don’t really have to until someone calls their bluff. With no one speaking publicly about whether there are any market studies showing that Vegas could support an MLB team or about how exactly a stadium there could be paid for, there isn’t much to say beyond what’s been said for months now: Kaval & Co. would clearly rather stay in Oakland in a new stadium with somebody else fronting $855 million for road and infrastructure upgrades, and Plan B remains some variation on “You don’t want to see what we’ll do when we get angry!” Which they already are, clearly, but they still haven’t followed through on threats to walk away from Oakland and get serious with Las Vegas, or at least they haven’t unless there’s secret serious behind-the-scenes talks going on, which there’s no evidence of, but then there wouldn’t be if they were secret — you know what, let’s just look at some pictures of the Nevada desert and go, “Wow, that’s deserty!” and call it a day.
On the first point: Even though Vegas will pass Pittsburgh in terms of population before long, you could argue that any sports team that sets up shop there (either through relocation or expansion) would still be at a disadvantage in terms of finding/building a lasting fanbase because so much of its population is from somewhere else — i.e. the new entrants will bring their existing sports/local loyalties with them and almost certainly won’t switch teams once they arrive.
Maybe that won’t be the case with MLS teams because there’s hardly anyone 18+ in America who had their, say, Chicago Fire fandom passed down to them by their parents and/or grandparents… but I think in any town where a huge % of its population is made up of transplants (like Orlando, where I live), the battle to win the hearts and minds of the locals is bound to be more difficult for sports teams than it would be in places where they’re much more woven into the local fabric (and in some cases, the only thing(s) they have to hang their hats on as a city).
At current rates of growth, per the linked Nielsen figures, Las Vegas will pass Pittsburgh in market size in the year 2103.
Just curious NdM,
If the Vegas Metro passes Pittsburgh in population in the near future, how will Pittsburgh still have a larger “market size” through 2103?
Because Vegas Metro isn’t going to pass Pittsburgh in population in the near future, at least not according to the 2021 vs 2020 numbers.
Vegas had a big boom in the last decade, but it’s slowed a bit in recent years. I wouldn’t be surprised if it catches Pittsburgh way before the end of the century, but I also wouldn’t be surprised if Pittsburgh passes Vegas again once climate change makes Nevada uninhabitably hot.
Climate change: interesting. I’m personally hoping rising sea levels make Oracle Park SF uninhabitable/unplayable so that the Giants can FINALLY move down here to $an Jo$e (and live up to the reason they have our territorial rights in the first place).
Those figures seem to have a pretty tight definition of a market size.
Pittsburgh’s “fanshed” – a term that I’ve tried to make happen for years to no avail – covers all of Western PA and into bits of central PA, lots of West Virginia and some of Ohio. My understanding is that’s about 3.5-4m people.
The greater Vegas area may be growing but still contains a whole lot of desert, does it not? (“A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are buried in those holes.”) Will it ever contain 4 million people?
That “spread” seems to be often overlooked by a lot of the press.
Just because Vegas can get 15,000+ people to show up 40 times a year for hockey (or 70,000 or whatever 8 times a year for football) does not mean it would be able to get 25-40,000 people 80 times a year in the summer for baseball.
And the relationship of market population to TV viewership is not linear.
For example, more people in Canada watched the NHL playoffs than in the US. Not just better ratings. More human beings total. (at least, I think I read that right)
The Penguins reportedly get more regional TV viewers than any other NHL *or NBA team* in the US. Yet Pittsburgh is a “small market.”
We don’t yet know if Vegas can get 65,000 people to show up for a professional football game even once… but I agree with your broader point. MLB would be a much different and harder sell in that market.
I am interested to see how the Golden Knights are doing, say, ten years after the initial expansion euphoria. Their tickets may be a considerably harder sell by then too.
For anyone interested in this story, hopefully the link to this Youtube video works. Its a must see
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_XV5LLs55A?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent&w=640&h=360]
It has seemed noteworthy and, truth be told, unserious, that the A’s chose Las Vegas as the focal point of their threats. It is trivially the case that if MLB wants the A’s to stay in the west Portland is the best market and even Sacramento beats Las Vegas by essentially all metrics. Obviously the reason the A’s have avoided going there is because they anticipate the same problems with those cities as they have gotten about San Jose – specific owners in San Francisco and Seattle who will see this as encroachment on their territory. But if no one is paying for a stadium in Oakland and the A’s management isn’t going to, they will have to introduce those actually somewhat plausible destinations in addition to the barely plausible for so many reasons Vegas.
I would agree that Vegas was “selected” more because they have shown a shocking willingness to throw money at other sports teams for no reason (IE: the Raiders). Call it triumph of the dumbest if you like.
There are plenty of better possible landing destinations than Las Vegas for the Athletics (in the, presently unlikely, event they do move). But if they aren’t going to get a free stadium from any of the other alleged candidates and have to build their own (or at least foot most of the cost), why would any of the other locations be better than the location they already have? (and at least partially own, depending on whether Fisher has actually bought the portion of the coliseum site the media has claimed he owns, or whether he just has an option to buy it)
I don’t think the A’s have the options Kaval would like us to think they have.
It would be great to see the team have to make decision on paying to build a stadium in Oakland or paying to build one somewhere else. We would then finally know whether they really think Oakland is worse than other potential destinations or not.
Something needs to be done about these teams claiming such an enormous home territory.
It’s particularly galling in baseball because those owners are most intent on telling us that the massive disparities in revenue are just the inevitable and necessary outcome of a “free market.”
Maybe the Athletics are being advised by the Spanos Strategy Group.
You know, keep threatening that you might leave if you don’t get the stadium deal you want even when you’ve been offered a really good one, then keep harping on it so long that you run out of options and time end up being “forced” into a move to a location you didn’t want to move to just to avoid having someone else move there in your place…
I find it funny that Sacramento is a reasonable solution and would once and for all find meaning to that godforsaken slab of concrete next to Sleep Train Arena nobody ever brings up, but it’s treated as Siberia.