Inside the NFL’s big Vegas gamble

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Super Bowl LVIII will surely reinforce the game’s status as the last nation-gathering entertainment event and ultimate brand showcase. But this year’s iteration—widely expected to inspire more betting than any prior Super Bowl—involves a high-stakes bet for one brand in particular: the NFL, and its surprising Vegas-ization.

At the heart of this gamble is the NFL’s relationship to gambling itself. For years, the league kept a careful distance from betting—despite its pervasiveness and popularity among many fans. But as gambling has increasingly gone mainstream, the NFL has adjusted. Betting-odds and similar chatter from commentators has now become a routine part of sports coverage, and Super Bowl LVIII will take that to a new level. In addition to a high-profile sponsorship by online betting giant FanDuel (and a pregame ad from its rival DraftKings), the game will be played at Allegiant Stadium, practically next door to the infamous Strip—a full-on embrace of the gambling capital that the NFL has long been wary of.

It’s hard to overstate what a long-odds proposition this would have been just 10 years ago. In the 1960s and 1970s, longtime NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle took a hardline stance to distance the sport from gambling in general, and Vegas in particular. Back then, much betting was illegal and carried the whiff of organized crime, ruinous addiction, potential corruption, and the league-integrity-threatening possibility of players throwing games.

“For decades, it was a precarious type of relationship,” Jay Kornegay, vice president of race and sports operations at Westgate Las Vegas, told the Associated Press this week. As recently as 2003, for instance, the NFL rejected a Super Bowl ad from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority that promoted the city as a destination, even though it made no reference to gambling. In 2015, the league blocked a fantasy football convention headlined by then-Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo because it was set to take place on a casino property. Given the thorny history, Kornegay said, this year feels like “a 180-degree turn.” At a Vegas event promoting the game, current commissioner Roger Goodell admitted he could not have imagined a Super Bowl in the city a decade ago, but: “You’ve become Sports Town USA, you really have.”  

This turnabout is not risk-free—as Goodell has acknowledged—and in some ways, the NFL still seems to be trying to hedge its, um, bets. Ads from NFL partners may encourage fans to place bets on games, but players and other league employees are banned from doing so. The league has fired, suspended, and otherwise punished violators; seven players this season received season-long bans for betting on NFL contests. Among other rules, players are barred from even entering a sports-gambling facility (or sportsbook) during the season, except to pass through it on their way elsewhere (say, en route from a Vegas hotel to the street).

For the Super Bowl, members of the Chiefs and 49ers are forbidden from any gambling at all, casinos included—in fact, they’re staying in a hotel 25 miles from the Strip. Still more rules restrict player-endorsement deals and promotional appearances tied to the gambling business, and the details can get confusing. (And partly because gambling adds fuel to fan conspiracies of games rigged by refs, those officials are now vetted “with the kind of vigor normally reserved for FBI candidates,” as Fast Company recently reported.) Apart from the potential for controversy if a prominent player missteps, the policies send a confusing message: Gambling is a harmless thrill—unless it’s a potential integrity wrecking ball. 

Still, the NFL (and other big leagues) have had little choice but to reckon with the reality of gambling’s popularity—and profit potential. These days, Las Vegas has a more multidimensional image beyond its Sin City roots, and has had success courting sports: NFL team owners voted in 2017 to allow the Raiders to move there; the city also now has NHL and WNBA franchises, with MLB’s Athletics coming soon.

But the real game changer was a 2018 Supreme Court decision that overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which had limited legal sports betting to Nevada. Other states moved to legalize the practice, now legal in 38 states. This presaged the birth of the booming modern sports-betting business, and three years ago the NFL announced sponsorship deals with multiple sports-betting firms valued at more than $1 billion. By one estimate, Americans bet more than $115 billion on various sporting events in 2023—and that’s just the figure for legal wagers. (We spend another $100 billion annually on lottery tickets.)

For years, the NFL has proved itself a successful interpreter of mass trends, sometimes by design, sometimes by luck. This year’s Super Bowl is already set to be a bonkers pop culture event thanks to the Taylor Swift-Travis Kelce circus, and in a more calculated big-tent move is offering a kid-friendly simulcast of the game via Nickelodeon, featuring SpongeBob and Dora, among others (though they presumably won’t be talking about parlays and over/unders). Maybe the gambling embrace is just another big-tent move.   

Not everyone buys the idea that gambling can be regulated into harmlessness. “I just don’t think it will be controlled,” Bill Bradley told the New York Times recently. The former senator, and retired Knicks star, helped shape the overturned law that restricted sports betting back in the early 1990s. “I think it will pervade the culture,” Bradley added.

And really, it already does. Super Bowl LVIII is a clear win for the Vegas brand, with NFL basically conceding gambling’s status as being as natural a fit for an all-American event as Taylor Swift. There are already NFL slot machines and an NFL store on the Strip. And the league is not alone: Disney steered well clear of gambling-related business until last year, with the creation of ESPN Bet. Americans are expected to place more than $23 billion in Super Bowl-related wagers—not just on the game but (via prop bets through some unregulated offshore operators) on Swift’s attendance and even her outfit.

Clearly, the NFL believes that whatever happens in Vegas this weekend won’t just stay in Vegas, and the league will take it in stride. It’s even money that they’re right.