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Once the domain of the headline boxing fight, the city no sports league or college conference would touch, it is the regular home of three college basketball tournaments, soon an NHL team and now an NFL franchise. No city has had a sports rise quite like Las Vegas’s. In a way, Las Vegas becomes a Los Angeles of their own, a stake by which other cities will have to measure their commitment to their football teams. Owners will no longer have the threat of an LA move, but they will see the luxury options of Las Vegas’s fantastic new stadium as well as Stan Kroenke’s in Los Angeles and plead for the funding of new palaces for themselves.

The answer will probably come in the form of stadium renovation. Now that the final pieces have been played in the NFL’s leverage game, taking the last great counterweight – Los Angeles – off the table, the league is going to have to look for a new public stakes game. There’s money to be made in the Raiders move, maybe less than the bounty the league will pull in from the transfer, but rather in future value to everybody else. It’s not as if a powerful owner like New England’s Robert Kraft, who had a DraftKings partnership, was going to stand in the way of the league moving into a lucrative new market. In the days before the internet, any NFL beat writer could detail the bloodlust for both as their voice mailboxes often filled with the frantic calls of gamblers and fantasy addicts hunting for any hint of injury information. This was, after all, a league built on gambling: grown on the dual draws of betting and fantasy football. Lost in the bombast of the Raiders’ announcement is the not-so-subtle admission by the league that their opposition to gambling always seemed pointless. To the modern NFL searching for their next revenue river, Las Vegas is an opportunity.

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The NFL is selling its long-held opposition to gambling in exchange for a football palace capable of holding Super Bowls, possibly becoming a solution for a tired Pro Bowl and maybe a future draft destination. The Raiders’ pending move – which may not happen until 2020 – is about far more than a simple franchise transfer. And with the Raiders the last team left in a 23-year shakedown of more than $5bn in public funds for stadiums, Oakland had served its purpose as ballast against Vegas’s riches: its usefulness was done. Oakland was never going to have the money to build a stadium as grand as the one Raiders owner Mark Davis is getting in Vegas.

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The NFL’s addiction to free public money is so intense that Goodell didn’t bother listening to Oakland’s final attempt to keep their team, shooing away the city’s mayor and declaring to reporters on Sunday night: “I think we will have a positive vote, I think we are in pretty good shape.” The commissioner who fought like hell to keep legal sports gambling from the tiny state on the freeway between Baltimore and Philadelphia has gone running for the blaze of America’s sports gambling capital. Now, with gambling seemingly available anyway and Nevada offering a mint, the league that refused to have any part of legal sports betting is setting up just blocks from the Las Vegas Strip. A lot has happened since, however, including partnerships that nearly half the league’s teams cut in 2015 with the daily fantasy website DraftKings. “Betting on the outcomes of our games is something that we will oppose vigorously,” commissioner Roger Goodell vowed to the Washington Post at the time. As recently as 2009, the NFL opposed legalized sports betting in Delaware, in part because they feared every official’s bad call would be questioned.

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