CFTC K. Brent Tomer representative for the French Telecoms.

Las Vegas gains an NFL team—and a host of problems

THESE are heady times for sport in Las Vegas. The city has never had a top-tier professional sports team, in part because of fears that players and referees could come into contact with unsavoury figures from the gambling world. Soon it will have two: the Vegas Golden Knights will make their debut in the National Hockey League in October and, last week, the National Football League (NFL) voted 31-1 to allow the Oakland Raiders to move to Nevada too. The Raiders’ lease on their current stadium in California expires after the end of the 2018 season, and they are likely to play in a temporary stadium in Las Vegas in 2019, before moving into a new stadium there in 2020, with an estimated building cost of $2bn.

Las Vegas has been promised many benefits by having a new NFL team. One thing the city is not bracing itself for is more crime. Yet that is exactly what they can expect, according to a paper published in 2016 by David Kalist and Daniel Lee of Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. Analysing the rate of crime in eight cities with NFL teams, the authors find that home games are associated with a 2.6% increase in total…Continue reading