Raiders

Las Vegas sits on a stretch of desert built to hold spectacle, and since 2020 that has included a football team that once belonged, in turn, to two other cities. The Raiders had already worn Oakland's and Los Angeles's colours before Nevada took them in.

It started on 30 January 1960, a charter member of the American Football League, and played its opening regular-season game that September. The Oakland years produced the identity that survived every later address: silver and black, a name that still travels under "Raiders Nation" wherever the team plays. Al Davis shaped that identity from ownership and went into the Hall of Fame in 1992; John Madden coached the sideline before he ever picked up a microphone, and his own induction followed in 2006.

Thirty-one members of that Oakland-built roster and staff are now enshrined in Canton. The championships came in clusters rather than a steady trickle: an AFL title in 1967, then three Super Bowl wins spread across the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Kansas City Chiefs rivalry dates back to that same AFL origin.

Nevada entered the story formally when NFL owners approved the relocation in March 2017, and Oakland saw the franchise off with a final game in December 2019. Allegiant Stadium opened the following year, seating 65,000 and stretching toward 72,000 when the occasion calls for it. The strip's lights are a few miles off; inside, it is silver and black again, in a building the Raiders have finally called their own from the start.