Billionaire Sheldon Adelson’s contribution to potentially bringing the Oakland Raiders to Las Vegas has much more to do with opportunity than football.
The 83-year-old spoke to Daniel Roberts of Yahoo Finance. Adelson has personally agreed to give $650 million of his own money towards a new stadium but admits he’s not an expert on the subject.
“No, I’m a minor football fan. My 17-year-old son is a fanatic about sports, particularly basketball and football. But I’m not. I know Bobby Kraft and I got interested in football.”
“So I’m doing it as a community effort. I don’t need it. I could live without it. It doesn’t move the needle for our company or any of the four [big local casino] properties to do it, Wynn, Sands, Caesars, and MGM.”
The incentive for Adelson helping build a new stadium would be the potential opportunity to make more money from non-football activities. He told Roberts he’d package the rooms in local hotels for prime seats in the stadium for festivities like concerts, MMA cards, and Major League Soccer. Adelson said co-owning a stadium would help improve a time of the year which is usually slow profit-wise.
Adelson was quite cocky regarding his importance in getting a stadium in Las Vegas, saying his clout would help get a deal done with local government.
“If [Raiders owner Mark Davis] wants to come to Vegas, he’s gotta get a team, he’s gotta get a stadium. He can’t build a stadium himself, otherwise he would have built it in Oakland. He needs somebody to build it and he needs somebody with a deep pocket that can guarantee it and somebody with some political influence that can arrange to get the money from the room tax. I’m one of the four big operators in town, so it’s not difficult for me. I’ve done a lot of building and I can guarantee the construction. And if the local government knows I’m behind it, they can feel comfortable because I’ve changed the town, in regards to conventions.”
The main takeaway from the interview, besides Adelson’s take-it-or-leave-it approach with Davis, is that he doesn’t really care about football and won’t be heartbroken if a deal doesn’t emerge from talks. He seems most interested because his children are football fans. The Raiders have plenty of hurdles to relocate from Oakland to Las Vegas, but they have a benefactor who could make the move a reality.
[Yahoo Finance/Image via Forward.com]
