Desert Raiders: Allegiant Stadium A Black Beacon by The Strip (Las Vegas Market Focus)

In Las Vegas, they pledge Allegiant Stadium. Hitting the six-year mark in July 2026, Allegiant Stadium is one of the newest and on-trend major sports and entertainment venues in the United States. Dubbed the “Death Star” for its black glass exterior and located in Paradise, Nevada, just west of the Las Vegas Strip, the venue is home to the NFL Raiders and UNLV Rebels football.

This article is part of the monthly Pollstar Market Focus feature, which includes additional editorial content, charts and more.

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“What makes Las Vegas so special is that entertainment really is part of the city’s DNA,” says Andy Gorchov, general manager of Allegiant Stadium. “Fans don’t just buy a ticket; they create an entire experience around it. They travel from out of town. They stay for several days, and it’s part of a larger vacation. That creates tremendous demand for artists and promoters. And the city has an unmatched collection of world-class venues – from the Sphere to theaters and other arenas – that allows the city to host basically every single type of entertainment there is.

“It really is a collaborative entertainment ecosystem in Vegas. …Every venue contributes to making it one of the best entertainment experiences in the world.”

Allegiant Stadium is the marquee venue in a neon-infused city that ranks No. 2 on Pollstar’s concert market rankings with 2025 live revenue at nearly $1 billion ($967,915,395) with 4,720,651 tickets sold.

In 2026, Allegiant Stadium won the Pollstar Award for Stadium of the Year for its live entertainment programming and guest experience, but despite its success and impact on the market, the stadium faced a less than auspicious start.

In 2016, Raiders owner Mark Davis announced plans to relocate the team from Oakland (for a second time) to Las Vegas. In March 2017, NFL owners approved the relocation by a vote of 31–1. Funding for the stadium combined $750 million in public financing (through Clark County hotel tax revenue) with private funding from the Raiders and partners. The stadium is publicly owned by the Las Vegas Stadium Authority and operated by Legends Global.

Groundbreaking began in November 2017, and construction took about 2½ years at a cost of $1.9 billion – making it one of the most expensive stadiums ever built.

The stadium opened without fans in July 2020 due to COVID-19. The Raiders played their inaugural home game on Sept. 21, 2020, defeating the New Orleans Saints on “Monday Night Football” to empty stands. The venue, which covers nearly 10 acres under its roof, has a capacity of 65,000 for NFL games and 71,000 for major events.

“The stadium opened during one of the most challenging periods in the live entertainment industry, and one year after opening, the stadium became Billboard’s No. 1 stadium in the world,” says Gorchov, who joined the stadium as GM in May 2024.

In addition to the distinctive exterior, the venue has a lightweight ETFE (ethylene tetrafluoroethylene) transparent roof; a retractable, end-zone wall overlooking the Strip; and a natural grass field that rolls outside the stadium on a massive tray weighing nearly 20 million pounds so the grass can grow in natural sunlight.

It’s the only NFL stadium with a fully enclosed climate-controlled environment paired with a movable natural-grass playing surface, allowing the Raiders to play on natural grass while concerts and other events can use the stadium floor without damaging the turf.

“If there’s one thing that any venue has to do today, it’s continuously evolve,” says Gorchov, who held executive positions at State Farm Stadium and Empower Field at Mile High before joining Allegiant Stadium. “And I think our approach has always been one of continuous evolution.”

Allegiant Stadium was designed as a technology-first venue, combining advanced engineering the digital fan experiences. The stadium features one of the NFL’s largest digital display systems, including a massive center-hung LED video board, a large LED ribbon that circles the seating bowl and thousands of additional digital displays throughout the concourses that provide wayfinding, concessions information and live event coverage. OVG Hospitality handles food and beverage at the stadium under the “Silver & Black” banner.

The stadium was built with connectivity in mind, with high-density Wi-Fi designed to support tens of thousands of simultaneous users, extensive 5G and cellular coverage, mobile ticketing throughout the venue and cashless concessions and retail to speed transactions.

Designed to host global TV events including Super Bowl LVIII in 2024, the facility has hundreds of broadcast camera positions, extensive fiber-optic infrastructure, multiple television production rooms and the power redundancy needed for a major live broadcast.

“It is really truly a multipurpose venue,” offers Gorchov. “The stadium not only combines the atmosphere and the scale of what’s one of the NFL’s and the world’s best stadiums, but it really does have the operational flexibility and efficiency that is typically associated with an arena. So, we’re able to host an incredibly diverse calendar of events throughout the year.”
Allegiant Stadium has hosted Pro Bowl games, the Pac-12 Football Championship (until the conference’s 2024 realignment) and a variety of high-profile concerts including Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, The Rolling Stones and Metallica.

According to Pollstar data, it was the location of the biggest stadium show in the market in 2025 with WWE WrestleMania 41 with a gross of $66,074,558 and 113,412 tickets sold over two shows beginning on April 19, 2025. WrestleMania 42 returned in April.

In May, the stadium sold out four BTS shows in an hour. On March 21, Luke Combs set multiple attendance records with his “My Kinda Saturday Night Tour.” With a paid attendance of 70,921, the concert was the largest crowd ever at the stadium and the largest indoor event attendance in Nevada history.

Combs’ in-the-round stage helped maximize seating capacity, allowing nearly every available seat in the stadium to be sold along with additional seats on the grass. The stadium’s flexible design offered some additional advantages. The steep seating bowl provided good sightlines, making more seats practical to sell and the climate-controlled environment meant weather didn’t interfere with seating or production.

The venue’s infrastructure helped manage the record crowd with multiple entry gates to reduce bottlenecks, wide concourses to keep pedestrian traffic flowing, high-capacity elevators and escalators serving premium areas, hundreds of high-definition security cameras, walk-through screening technology and advanced access-control systems.

Major events coming up include Ed Sheeran’s “LOOP Tour” (July 18), AC/DC’s “Power Up Tour” (Aug. 1), Karol G (Aug. 7), Guns N’ Roses (Aug. 22), “The R&B Tour” with Usher Raymond and Chris Brown (Sept. 5, 6, 18), Foo Fighters (Sept. 26) and the “Double Down Tour” with Jason Aldean and Luke Bryan on Dec. 11.

In 2027, the stadium hosts the College Football Playoff National Championship game on Jan. 25 as well as the NCAA Men’s Final Four in 2028 and the Super Bowl returns in 2029.

The Las Vegas Raiders are preparing for a new season under first-year head coach Klint Kubiak, with several high-profile home games expected to draw large crowds. The team hosts the Arizona Cardinals in their first 2026 preseason home game on Aug. 13.

“When I started, the one thing I was told by so many different people was that in Vegas we do it bigger and better than everybody else,” offers Gorchov. “So, you go into every kind of scenario with that mindset. It doesn’t matter what we do. We’re Las Vegas, and that means something.”

For fans who want a backstage peek, the stadium offers guided tours. The standard tour costs $65.99 and lasts about 75 minutes, covering more than a mile of walking with access to areas that event ticket holders never see.

“It gives the building a soul,” Gorchov says of the tours. “You feel that there’s a soul here. And again, the Raiders deserve an incredible amount of credit for that.”

Offered on select non-event days, the tour is one of the best in the NFL because it includes areas that are normally off-limits including the Raiders’ locker room and owners’ suite in addition to the Al Davis Memorial Torch, press conference room, Lombardi trophies from the Raiders’ three Super Bowl wins, player tributes, luxury private suites, premium club spaces and the Raiderette locker room with decades of game-day uniforms on display.

“We are very proud of what we’ve accomplished over the past six years since the building opened, but we’re also very humble about it,” says Gorchov. “None of it happens without the trust of the Raiders and the confidence of the promoters and the artists, all our partners and our incredible staff here at the stadium. We’re grateful for every opportunity that we’ve been given. But we’re very excited about the future.”