Sidewalks and overpasses festooned with red and purple signage. Corporate installations and official merchandise stands still being erected. Sprawling casino floors filled with fans clad in football jerseys, huddled around table games and feeding bills into NFL-branded slot machines. The first Super Bowl to be played in Las Vegas was still days away, but the signposts of America’s high holy day were already in full view on a drizzly Monday afternoon up and down the famous Strip.
They were scenes that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago, when the major US professional sports leagues – none more than the NFL – uniformly shunned Vegas for its associations with gambling culture. But when the San Francisco 49ers and Kansas City Chiefs kick off the nation’s biggest sporting event on Sunday at Allegiant Stadium, it will mark the culmination of a city’s improbable rebranding from old gambling town to America’s sports capital.
