Las Vegas Spent Decades Rejecting the Super Bowl. Now It Could Bring in $700 Million

Try to shake it off, Swifties. The players are gonna play-play-play on Sunday, but Las Vegas learned how to parlay pro football’s big game into big crowds and bigger profits long before the Strip landed Super Bowl LVIII at Allegiant Stadium.

From street vendors selling $40 T-shirts to resale brokers getting more than $30,000 a ticket for the best remaining seats, the Super Bowl between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs is estimated to draw 330,000 people to Las Vegas and pump as much as $700 million into the economy. Service workers and security companies are working overtime — and in a community reliant on gambling and tourism, even a tiny piece of the action can mean a lot.

For decades, casinos and the community’s legion of sports bars have promoted parties for every pocketbook — to the official chagrin of the NFL commissioner and his attorneys. The league, which was started by bookmakers and their friends, got the vapors at the very mention of “Super Bowl” and “Las Vegas” sharing the same marquee.

That stance rapidly changed in 2018 after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which essentially limited legal bookmaking to Nevada. Suddenly, the idea of legalizing, regulating — and taxing — an activity already practiced by millions became politically palatable. Today, 38 states and Washington, D.C., have legal sports betting, and the NFL is in partnership with casino corporations and online sports. Hey, no deal is bad if you get a piece of it, right?

But if Las Vegas was already cashing in on the Super Bowl, then just how much bigger can actually hosting the event be? Even with the celebrity icing of Taylor Swift and Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce on top?

The math is simple, Gaughan Gaming Sports Book director Vincent Magliulo says. “Allegiant Stadium holds 65,000 people. That means most of the 330,000 people coming to Las Vegas won’t be watching the game from inside the stadium.”

Those throngs of free-spending tourists are staying extra days, while corporations are pouring into town to entertain their best clients. Unlike in previous years dominated by weekend visitors, hosting the Super Bowl means a full week of events and promotions. “Hosting the Super Bowl fills the entire city at a height that we don’t see, really, on a normal Super Bowl week,” Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO and President Steve Hill says.

Small businesses are also benefiting from the NFL’s Business Connect program designed to help local diverse business owners compete for Super Bowl vendor contracts. “Not every service industry here is an industry that is going to directly participate in the Super Bowl or the events surrounding it,” Hill says, “but any time you raise the economy in the community, it reverberates at some level throughout the community.”

Sports bars and the casinos’ super-sized betting books will burst at the seams on Sunday, but tourists face higher room rates and costs for food and beverages even before they place their first wager. Casino bargain guru and Las Vegas Advisor publisher Anthony Curtis says you have about as much chance finding discount accommodations this week in the gaming corridor as you have of winning a date with Taylor Swift.

“I’ve always felt being in a Las Vegas sports book or bar is better than being at the game, and that doesn’t change just because the game is here,” Curtis says. “Aside from those things, which are essentially free, there’s not much in the way of bargains, rooms or otherwise.”

The biggest winners on Super Bowl Sunday will almost surely be the Las Vegas sports books on a day when the expanding nation of legal bookmakers are expected to handle a record $1.5 billion in wagers, according to the American Gaming Association. Illegal gambling on the game is expected to exceed $23 billion.

Given the increased frenzy of having the Super Bowl on the Strip, estimates from multiple sources say Las Vegas books should easily exceed last year’s $153 million in wagers. Bookmaking hall-of-famer Magliulo, who like many in his profession has watched in amazement at all the changes in the industry, estimates the handle might go as high as $200 million. That would set a record in Las Vegas for the event.

The 49ers remain a slight favorite. With 19 legal-sized pages of proposition wagers, which offer a chance to bet on everything from which team will win the opening coin toss to which player will score the first touchdown, there are plenty of choices available. When the payouts and collections are finished, historically the Las Vegas books have averaged a slightly better than seven percent profit on Super Bowl wagers.

“There was a time when we, as a city, couldn’t even advertise,”  Magliulo says. “We couldn’t buy one of those 30- or 60-second spots from the networks to run an LVCVA commercial. But now the game is here. The best way I can sum it up is, it’s a confirmation. The NFL, the respective leagues, and even the NCAA have realized what we’ve known all along, that Las Vegas is as premiere an event-driven destination as anywhere in the world. Nobody can put on an event like we can.”

In Las Vegas, Super Bowl weekend traditionally brings a dramatic increase in public and private security. Local law enforcement has greatly increased its presence and that includes the Metro Police Department Vice unit, which increasingly focuses on sex traffickers. Although visitors might be astonished given all the professional sexual encounters available in Las Vegas by phone and app, prostitution is illegal in Clark County.

But 88 miles north on US 95 in Nye County, the metaphorical red light is always on at the Alien Cathouse, where sex workers who call themselves the Cosmic Kittens beckon travelers in from the two-lane highway that runs through one of the nation’s least-populated areas. One of 19 legal houses in the state, the Alien employs up to seven sex workers depending on customer traffic.

Operations manager Dee Dee says she hopes to see everyone busy for when the Super Bowl after-parties begin. “I’ve seen other events bring an upswing in visitors at times, so I’m waiting to see what happens this year,” she says. “It could be interesting.”

Then, like so many Nevadans rooting for the home team — Las Vegas, that is — even Dee Dee can’t help sounding a little like a member of the chamber of commerce.

“We definitely wish Las Vegas all the luck operating this event,” she says. “It should be a good one, and I hope to see a few people come up our way afterward.”

Around these parts, everyone wants a little piece of the action.