The Oakland Raiders need a new stadium.
Their current home is one of the NFL’s worst facilities.
If they can’t get a new stadium in Oakland, they might have to move.
A Las Vegas investor is interested in building a football stadium in “Sin City” and having the Raiders move to the desert.
In the past, the NFL has been wary of the Las Vegas market due to the extensive football betting that goes on in legal sports books.
Commissioner Roger Goodell was asked about the Raiders, vis-a-vis Las Vegas, at the NFL Owner’s Meeting in Boca Raton, last week.
“(Raiders owner) Mark Davis is appropriately looking at all of his alternatives,” Goodell said. “We were very open about that when we were in Houston and we made the decision to return the Rams to Los Angeles. Both for San Diego and Oakland. They need to evaluate those alternatives.
“I think their ultimate decision is a long ways off. There are several cities that have a tremendous interest in the Raiders. I’m hopeful also that Oakland will be one of those and that we can avoid any relocation to start with. Those are ultimately decisions about where they go and the impact that the potential gambling that we’d have to deal with. We’d have to understand it, we’d have to understand what the impact is on us and ultimately each owner would have a vote on that.
Does being open to Las Vegas represent a philosophical shift with the NFL?
“No,” Goodell said. “Relocations are always, as you know and we experienced it this January: one, painful, but two, subject to 32 teams’ view about it. They each make their own decision on that. That would be a factor that I think many owners would have to balance, the league would have to balance, but until we got a hard proposal that really put that in front of us, we’d have to understand what the ramifications of that are.”
