After months and months of speculation, rumors, broken deals. and failed negotiations, it is finally official. Today, during the NFL owners meeting in the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix the owners voted to approve the Oakland Raiders' move to Las Vegas. The Raiders needed at least 24 votes to approve the move and got 31 votes, with the only team voting against the move being the Miami Dolphins.
What does this mean for Las Vegas?
Las Vegas will be getting its first NFL team ever and its second professional sports team after the NHL's Las Vegas Golden Knights got approved for expansion in 2016 and will start playing in the upcoming 2017-18 season.
However, the new stadium that Oakland will play in is not expected to be ready until 2020. This means that NFL football will still be three years away from actually happening in the city. The new $1.9 billion domed stadium, will hold 65,000 seats and will be shared with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Of the $1.9 billion for the new stadium, $500 million will come from the Raiders and $750 million from a hotel tax passed last October. The rest of the money will be financed by Bank of America.
Where does Oakland go from here?
The Raiders hold a pair of one year team options for the next two seasons to play in the Oakland Coliseum, which owner Mark Davis says the team will use since the Las Vegas stadium will not be ready until 2020.
That means the team will play in Oakland for the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons, even though their fans will know that they will be leaving. Where the team will play in the 2019-2020 season is yet to be determined.
For Oakland, losing a team that has called the city home for the past 22 seasons and for 43 seasons in total is devastating.
The city made a last-ditch effort on Friday by announcing a revised stadium plan to keep the team, but NFL Commissioner Rodger Goodell shot it down. This is another loss for the city, as the Golden State Warriors are moving across the bay to their new stadium in San Francisco in 2019.
