On January 22, 2020, the Oakland Raiders, an American football team that competed in the National Football League (NFL), moved from its original city of Oakland, California, to the Las Vegas metropolitan area. The team began play as the Las Vegas Raiders in the 2020 NFL season. The Raiders were the third NFL team to move from one metropolitan area to another in the 2010s.
Raiders owner Mark Davis decided to move the team after years of failed efforts to renovate or replace the Oakland Coliseum, long rated one of the worst NFL stadiums. NFL team owners approved the move, 31–1, at their annual meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, on March 27, 2017.
The Raiders became the third NFL franchise to move in the 2010s, after the Rams' 2016 return to Los Angeles, California, from St. Louis, Missouri, and the Chargers' 2017 return from San Diego to Los Angeles. The Raiders were the second professional sports franchise to represent Las Vegas, after the Vegas Golden Knights, created in 2017 by the National Hockey League.
Background The Oakland Raiders were founded as a charter member of the American Football League (AFL) in 1960. The team joined the NFL as a result of the merger in 1970. From 1966 until 1981, it played home games at the Oakland Coliseum, which it shared with Major League Baseball's Oakland Athletics after that team moved to Oakland from Kansas City, Missouri in 1968. In 1980 Al Davis, dissatisfied with the stadium situation in Oakland and seeing luxury suites as the future of the NFL, came to an agreement with the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission to move the Raiders to Los Angeles. The NFL had refused to let the team move, but a court overruled the league, clearing the way for the Raiders to move to Los Angeles and become the Los Angeles Raiders in 1982. The Raiders played home games at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum from 1982 to 1994. In 1995, the Raiders returned to Oakland after the city and Alameda County agreed to build the luxury and club seats on to the Oakland Coliseum with a structure that would become known as Mount Davis. Davis chose to return the Raiders to Oakland after the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission failed to deliver on promised renovations to build luxury suites (the Coliseum would not have luxury suites until a 2019 renovation), and after he was unable to secure a new stadium in the Los Angeles area that met his conditions (plans to build new stadiums in Irwindale and in Inglewood at the future site of SoFi Stadium in the late 1980s and early 1990s respectively collapsed). At one point a proposed move to Sacramento that involved Davis taking ownership of the Sacramento Kings, looked possible but that deal fell apart.
Las Vegas had been home to a number of other professional football franchises between 1994 and the Raiders' arrival, none of which were particularly successful. The Las Vegas Posse, part of the Canadian Football League's effort to enter the U.S. market, lasted one season in 1994 and suffered from a poor on-field product and low attendance. The XFL included the Las Vegas Outlaws in its lone 2001 season. Attendance and on-field performance were respectable, and the team embraced the city's culture, but the Outlaws' modest success was overshadowed by the failure of the XFL. The Las Vegas Locomotives of the United Football League were a major on-field success and were one of the UFL's best teams; it nonetheless suffered from poor attendance that continued to decline throughout the league's existence to the point that its last home game drew only 600 fans. The Arena Football League included three teams in Las Vegas over the course of its history: the Las Vegas Sting (1994 and 1995), Las Vegas Gladiators (2003 to 2007, who moved to Cleveland and became the Cleveland Gladiators before folding), and another Las Vegas Outlaws (2015). The Las Vegas Sin of the Lingerie Football League (now the Extreme Football League) played in the city from 2011 to 2014.
The hunt for a home
Recent efforts to either renovate the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum or replace it with a new football stadium in Oakland or elsewhere began on November 18, 2009. In 2011, Al Davis died; control of the team was assumed by his son Mark Davis who made the three-decade stadium problem a top priority. The Raiders were free to move after the 2013 NFL season, when its lease at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum expired. While exploring possible solutions in the Bay Area and elsewhere, the Raiders signed one-year extensions of its lease on the Coliseum.
2011: Levi's Stadium The Raiders were talking with the San Francisco 49ers about sharing the planned Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California. However, the 49ers went ahead without the Raiders and broke ground on the $1.2 billion stadium on April 19, 2012, and afterwards sold $670 million worth of seats including 70% of club and luxury suites, making it more unlikely that the Raiders would want to explore any idea of sharing the stadium as they would then be secondary tenants with few to no commercial rights over the highly lucrative luxury suites.
In October 2012, Mark Davis told NFL Network reporter Ian Rapoport that he had no plans to share the stadium but that he did recognize the Raiders' need for a new home and that he hoped the new home would be in Oakland. When Levi's Stadium opened on July 17, 2014, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell mentioned to the live crowd that it would make a great home for the Raiders and that the team had to decide whether or not it wanted to play there or build a stadium on the site of the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum.
2012–2013: Coliseum City On March 7, 2012, then-Mayor Jean Quan unveiled an ambitious project to the media that was designed to improve the sports facilities of all three major league sports teams in the city (the Raiders, the Oakland Athletics, and the Golden State Warriors), as well as attract new businesses to the city. The project, dubbed Coliseum City, had entailed the redevelopment of the existing Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum complex. The redevelopment would have seen the construction of two new stadiums on the present location, a baseball-only stadium and a football-only stadium, while Oracle Arena, home of the Warriors, would have been either rebuilt or undergone extensive renovations. A sum of $3.5 million was committed to preliminary planning on the project. However, no officials from either of Oakland's major league teams were present at the media conference.
According to the San Francisco Business Times, Oakland's assistant city administrator Fred Blackwell said the Bay Investment Group LLC, an entity formed by Colony Capital LLC, Rashid Al Malik (chairman and CEO of HayaH Holdings), and the city, had numerous details to continue working out for the prospective $2 billion Coliseum City project, which covered 800 acres surrounding the Oakland–Alameda Coliseum Complex. The development team also included JRDV Urban International, HKS Architects, and Forest City Real Estate Services. In an ideal situation, construction could have started by the end of 2014. Meanwhile, the Warriors began to go forward with plans to build a new arena at Mission Bay, not far from Oracle Park, and move across the Bay from Oakland to San Francisco in 2019. The Athletics were also seeking a new ballpark to replace the Coliseum, and were at the time looking at a site in San Jose.
In April 2014, after funding was thought to have dried up for the project, Quan gave an interview to KGMZ-FM where she announced that developers working on Coliseum City "are partnered literally with the prince of Dubai, who is next in line to lead Dubai. And they have capital."' The statement was immediately walked back by her spokesperson who said no actual partnership was in place.
2013: Concord, California The abandoned Concord Naval Weapons Station, 26.6 miles from Oakland, was announced in 2013 as a possible location for a new stadium but developments failed to materialize.
2014: San Antonio, Texas In July 2014, San Antonio, Texas, emerged as a potential destination for the team, after Raiders owner Mark Davis visited the city for the induction of former Raiders wide receiver Cliff Branch into a local hall of fame. San Antonio, while a smaller media market than the San Francisco Bay Area, had a relatively new and NFL-ready stadium in the Alamodome, and less sporting competition. On July 29, 2014, the San Antonio Express-News reported that Mark Davis met with San Antonio government officials to discuss a move after the 2014–15 NFL season. The Raiders would have played at the 65,000-seat Alamodome until a new stadium could be built. San Antonio remained in contention through at least November 2014, when Raiders staffers scouted the stadium and began negotiating with city officials. In December 2018, Davis said that his main concern with the Alamodome was the stadium's artificial turf.
2015: Raiders attempt to put together a project with Athletics It was reported in early 2015 that the Raiders met with Athletics owner Lewis Wolff in an effort to create a stadium solution where two separate stadiums (one for the Raiders and one for the Athletics) would have been built on the coliseum site. The Athletics balked at the deal. In an interview with J. T. the Brick on KGMZ on April 4, 2017, Davis revealed that he offered Wolff 20% of the Raiders in an attempt to get a deal done. Davis further elaborated that the closest the Raiders came to a deal in Oakland was in 2013 with Colony Capital, before the Athletics agreed to a 10-year lease extension at the Coliseum with the city of Oakland.
2015: Los Angeles project and losing to the Rams
On February 19, 2015, the Raiders and the then San Diego Chargers announced that they would build a privately financed $1.78 billion stadium in Carson, California if they were to move back to the Los Angeles market. Both teams stated that they would continue to attempt to get stadiums built in their respective cities. The Carson City Council bypassed a public vote and approved the plan 3–0. The council voted without having clarified several issues, including who would finance the stadium, how the required three-way land swap would be performed, and how it would raise enough revenue if only one team moved in as tenant.
On January 12, 2016, the NFL rejected the Raiders' request to move in favor of a competing plan by Stan Kroenke to move the St. Louis Rams back to Los Angeles and construct a stadium and entertainment district in Inglewood, California. However, the NFL left open the possibility of the Raiders moving to Los Angeles by 2020 and playing in the new stadium under construction to house the Los Angeles Rams. The San Diego Chargers had the first option to join the Rams at the new stadium. The Raiders would have been authorized to negotiate an agreement if the Chargers did not exercise their option by January 2017. The Chargers exercised their choice and announced their move to Los Angeles in January 2017, shutting the Raiders out of the Southern California market.
Around this time other markets expressed interest in luring the Raiders. Duluth, Minnesota, proposed to build a stadium for the team, a proposal that was not taken seriously because of the metro area's small size, proximity to the Minnesota Vikings, and unwillingness to commit money to the stadium proposal.
2015–2017: Negotiations to move to Las Vegas and last Oakland stadium effort
2015: Exploring Las Vegas