MGM Resorts Building Out Sports Events Division

When Jannik Sinner, the top-ranked men’s tennis player in the world, agreed to start serving a three-month ban connected to a pair of failed doping tests, the news reverberated to Las Vegas — where Sinner was scheduled to play in next week’s MGM Rewards Slam at Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.

That meant MGM Resorts International had to adapt quickly and it did so, quickly signing up Casper Ruud to fill in for Sinner. The No. 5-ranked Ruud is scheduled to join No. 2 Alexander Zverev, No. 4 Taylor Fritz and No. 9 Tommy Paul in the men’s event with women’s No. 1 Aryna Sabalenka and Naomi Osaka also playing at Michelob Ultra Arena.

“It’s been an interesting week, that’s for sure,” said Lance Evans, senior vice president of global sports, corporate partnerships and sponsorships at MGM Resorts International. “The beauty about our event is that it is right before Indian Wells. So for us to reach out to the agents and say, ‘Hey, we had a void that we need to fill, what’s the best possible outcome for the event’ and that’s having Casper.”

(That said, Fritz withdrew from the Acapulco tournament on Monday with an injury and both Ruud and Paul withdrew on Wednesday with illness issues. while Zverev was upset in the second round.)

MGM Resorts Live Event Ventures will organize the tennis exhibition for the second consecutive year after last year’s much-discussed Netflix Slam between Rafael Nadal and Carlos Alcaraz. The division within MGM also has produced programming including LPGA T-Mobile Match Play and Players Era Festival and pickleball events featuring Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf.

“Las Vegas has become the sports capital,” Evans said. With the NFL and NHL already in market, “our team needs to figure out how to find new and creative events to bring to Las Vegas that are different than those. The ones that make sense are golf, racket sports, things like soccer that aren’t happening today in Las Vegas to any permanent degree. Our goal is to find events that people want to go to and attend year after year after year.”

In planning and determining the types of events to start and organize, MGM has performed customer analysis to find ways to get customers to return to Las Vegas repeatedly throughout the year — then find top talent for those events to layer on casual sports fans to go with the repeat business.

“If we want to do an event, we have to do it when the talent’s going to be available,” Evans said. “We start with first understanding the types of events that we want to do and then understand what the availability of the talent is. And then we overlay that with the existing event schedule that we have. In some cases we have to move things around or we have to change talent in order to accommodate all of them, but ultimately we have to have the right talent, we have to have the right dates and we have to have the right sports. Our customers aren’t showing up without A-list talent. So that’s our first and foremost priority.”

Leaning into Golf

One event that has mixed talent and the opportunity to broadcast the brand internationally has been the T-Mobile Match Play, the fifth annual event presented by MGM Rewards scheduled for April. The LPGA event is a 64-player field with a $2 million purse; the tournament covers the competitors’ hotel expenses as well.

“In Asia, women’s golf is giant,” Evans said. “For us to bring customers from overseas, it doesn’t just drive domestic visitation. It drives international visitation and then viewership. So we can promote our resorts and our destination more intentionally. We saw incredible success with the LPGA, broadcasting it in Korea and Japan and China, bringing fans from those markets into Las Vegas and then be able to showcase our golf course and our properties globally.”

While golf was planned for international impact, one of the biggest national events was MGM’s rollout of the Players Era college basketball tournament in November 2024 with an NIL component paying a prize pool of $9 million with the winning team earning $500,000. Next year’s tournament will feature 18 teams; of the announced field, eight are currently ranked in The Associated Press Top 25 with six of them in the top 10 (No. 1 Auburn, No. 4 Houston, No. 5 Tennessee, No. 6 Alabama, No. 7 St. John’s and No. 9 Iowa State).

“It checked all of our boxes to a point to where we feel really confident in future years,” Evans said. “We think it’s going to be something that’s going to be embedded in the ecosystem of college basketball for years to come.”

The plan for the division is to be focused on events that can be held annually instead of one-off events, although Evans said those could be considered down the line at some point. There is also the ability through MGM’s reach to plan events that can be in Las Vegas or at another property that it owns whether in the U.S. or internationally.

“If we’re doing our jobs correctly, the events that we do here and events that we’ll do internationally, we’ll be able to travel, we’ll be able to move around,” he said. “I think ultimately we’re creating events that can resonate in other markets. There are sports growing in other parts of the world that aren’t necessarily as popular here that may not make sense to do in the United States that might make sense to do in Macau or another market. The global nature of our business will definitely have impact on its long-term growth and success.”