Jackpot: Super Bowl, Taylor Swift Expected to Bring Economic Boon to Las Vegas

Football. Sin City. And yes, probably Taylor Swift.

The combination of America’s most popular professional sports league holding its biggest game of the year in a city known for free-flowing cash already holds the promise of a hefty economic haul. Add in the potential attendance of the world’s most famous pop star, and there’ll be no blank spaces on the proverbial check Las Vegas could cash by the weekend’s end.

“I think it absolutely amplifies an already very, very large effect,” says Curtis Dubay, chief economist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

That “very, very large” effect refers to the expected economic impact on Las Vegas and the surrounding metro area due to hosting the big game between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, Feb. 11. The city’s Convention and Visitors Authority projects the total impact to be around $500 million, in addition to approximately $70 million in local and state tax revenue. Las Vegas will also get about 150,000 extra visitors due to hosting the Super Bowl, and those people are expected to spend $215 million on food, drinks, hotels and game-related items, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

And Dubay notes the state of Nevada will benefit because Clark County and the city itself benefit.

“All told, the Super Bowl will likely be an economic boon for the local economy, as tourism spending increases as a result of visitors from all over the world flocking into the metro to watch the game, either at the stadium or one of many bars, restaurants or casinos,” reads an analysis by Wells Fargo.

These projections might not even take into account the impact of Swift, who is dating Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce and could be at the game on Sunday. The superstar musician and singer-songwriter has already generated an equivalent brand value of about $330 million for the Chiefs and the NFL as a whole, according to Apex Marketing Group research reported by Front Office Sports. There remains the possibility that Swift won’t make it to Las Vegas, as she’ll have just wrapped up a tour stop in Tokyo, but the mere chance that she might be there is impactful, Dubay says.

“It helps the spectacle of the Super Bowl in general and I think that means that it benefits everyone,” he says. “All football fans are going to tune in, and then you have people on the periphery who care about the spectacle, want to watch the halftime show, see the commercials. That cohort of people is going to be a lot bigger than in previous years just because Taylor Swift is such a huge star. They’re going to want to tune in and see how often the broadcast cuts to her, what they say, what she’s wearing, what she’s cheering. They’re going to be tuned into social media to see what people are saying about it.”

Dubay adds that the growing popularity of the NFL correlates with the growing economic impact of the Super Bowl for a host city each year. The impact, he says, is generally larger for a big city like Las Vegas or Phoenix – which is near where the 2023 Super Bowl was hosted in Glendale, Arizona – because of its ability to bring in a lot of people.

At least one analyst, however, quibbles with just how large the economic impact will be in reality.

“While the league and sports boosters claim that the game brings up to a $500 million economic impact to host cities, a review of the literature suggests that the true economic impact is a fraction of this amount,” Victor Matheson, a professor at College of the Holy Cross, wrote in a 2010 study about the economics of the Super Bowl.

The research still applies today, he says in an interview, and even as the NFL becomes more popular, the “number of people that can go to the Super Bowl doesn’t change.”

There’s also the matter of opportunity cost in terms of who can’t come to Las Vegas because of the presence around the game, Matheson adds. He says Las Vegas is “weird” and “has more hotel rooms than God does,” so he is “less worried about crowding out and filling out all of” the hotel rooms.

There is, however, concern “about displacing one type of visitor” for another because of how busy Las Vegas is many weekends already, Matheson says. He notes that the Chinese New Year, which starts on Saturday, often brings “extremely high rollers” from Asia, and those visitors now “might get crowded out.” Other visitors who spent a lot of money on tickets to Sunday’s game also might not want to spend much elsewhere in the city, he adds.

“Do Super Bowl fans gamble at the blackjack table in the same way?” Matheson wonders, referring to the typical Las Vegas gambling visitor. “Sure, they might put down $50 on Kansas City. But are they going to spend four hours at a blackjack table emptying out their wallet?”

He says what’s often glossed over in the discussion of the economic impact of hosting the Super Bowl is all the direct costs to the city itself, noting the NFL’s costly requirements and the $750 million in public financing for Allegiant Stadium, where Sunday’s game will be held. Regardless of this context, Matheson says host cities are “almost certainly generating, at least as a greater metropolitan area, more in economic impact probably than it’s costing them in direct costs.”

“My caution is always: We do have some evidence that these events make us happy,” he adds. “We just don’t have a whole lot of evidence that they make us rich.”

Beyond the financial questions, Dubay, of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, argues that there are more intangible effects that come with hosting the big game.

“I think there’s a legitimacy aspect that comes with it as well,” Dubay says. “So if you’re a city that gets to host an Olympics, you are now a metropolitan, cosmopolitan global city. I think the same thing applies for the Super Bowl – that you are a big-time city that can host a big-time event, and that puts you in a different category than other cities.”