The Athletics haven’t played a single regular-season game as the Las Vegas Athletics. The team’s permanent home on the Strip won’t open until February 29, 2028, nearly two years from now. The franchise is still technically based in Sacramento as a stopgap arrangement, playing select games at Las Vegas Ballpark in Summerlin as a sort of long-distance courtship with the city that will eventually claim them.
And yet, on Friday, June 5, 2026, the Athletics rolled out their third major premium seating announcement in less than a year. The Dugout Clubs. Seats positioned directly behind the dugouts along the first and third baselines, marketed as offering some of the closest sightlines to live action anywhere in Major League Baseball, complete with private VIP entrances, dedicated concourse access, and all-inclusive food and non-alcoholic beverage service.
“Our goal is to create the most intimate and engaging fan experience in Major League Baseball, and the Dugout Clubs are the next example of that vision coming to life,” A’s President Marc Badain said in the announcement.
It’s an interesting sentence to parse closely, because it reveals exactly what kind of franchise the Athletics are trying to build in Las Vegas, and exactly who they’re building it for first.
The Sequence of Announcements Tells the Story
The Dugout Clubs didn’t appear in isolation. They’re the third tier in a deliberately staged rollout that began with the Athletic Club, designed by restaurateur and hospitality figure Will Guidara, positioned directly behind home plate as what the team describes as the most exclusive space in the entire ballpark. Members there get access to a private restaurant and supper club offering multi-course, table-service dining, alongside an upscale lounge with small plates, craft beer, curated wines, and premium cocktails.
Next came the Diamond Club, developed in partnership between Aramark and Guidara as an all-inclusive social hub for premium ticket members, positioned adjacent to the Athletic Club to extend that same high-end hospitality experience to a broader, though still exclusive, tier of season-ticket holders.
Now the Dugout Clubs round out the top-tier seating menu, occupying the most valuable real estate from a pure baseball-watching standpoint, the seats closest to the field along the baselines, while still wrapping that proximity in the same VIP treatment: private entrance, dedicated concourse, all-inclusive food and beverage.
Three premium tiers, announced in sequence, each sold before the more accessible general seating options have been detailed publicly. That ordering isn’t an accident. It reflects how modern sports franchises actually fund stadium construction and, more importantly, how they think about which fans matter most in the earliest stages of a market launch.
What This Tells You About Stadium Economics
Premium seating sells first because premium seating generates the revenue per square foot that makes the entire venue financially viable. A single suite or club seat can generate multiples of what an equivalent number of standard seats produce over a season, through a combination of higher base pricing, food and beverage minimums, and the kind of long-term corporate and high-net-worth commitments that provide predictable revenue well before opening day.
The Athletics’ new ballpark carries a price tag that has already grown substantially from its original projections. What started as a $1.5 billion stadium plan has climbed to an estimated $2 billion total cost, with $380 million of that coming from Nevada taxpayer funding secured through state legislation, and the remainder funded through private capital that the team has been actively raising since hiring Galatioto Sports Partners in 2024 specifically to secure $500 million in additional financing.
That financing reality explains the sequencing perfectly. Selling Athletic Club and Diamond Club memberships first, then Dugout Clubs, builds confirmed revenue commitments that make the remaining construction financing easier to secure and helps demonstrate market demand to lenders, investors, and Nevada officials watching how the public-private partnership performs. Marc Badain has been explicit on this point in public commission meetings, telling officials that more affordable seating options, including family-oriented and locals-focused pricing, will come as the 2028 opening gets closer, but that the premium products needed to come first.
Whether that ordering feels right to Las Vegas residents who aren’t in the market for a private dining experience behind home plate is a separate question entirely.
The Architecture Behind the Sales Pitch
The ballpark itself, designed by Bjarke Ingels and his firm BIG along with HNTB, represents a genuinely ambitious architectural undertaking. The design features a climate-controlled environment, essential for a Las Vegas summer that regularly pushes past 110 degrees, along with sweeping roof panels and what the team describes as one of the largest cable-glass window installations in North America.
The site itself carries historical weight that shouldn’t be glossed over. The ballpark is rising on the footprint of the former Tropicana Las Vegas, a Strip institution that operated for decades before being demolished to clear the land. Surrounding the new ballpark will be a rebuilt Bally’s Las Vegas, a 3,005-room resort that will essentially wrap around the stadium, creating an integrated entertainment district rather than a standalone sports venue dropped into an existing neighborhood.
With 80 percent of seating positioned inside the foul poles, the design philosophy clearly prioritizes the kind of intimate sightlines that make premium seating like the Dugout Clubs genuinely compelling rather than simply expensive. This isn’t a generic multipurpose stadium retrofitted for baseball. It’s purpose-built around the idea that proximity to the field is itself the primary product being sold.
The Slow-Motion Relocation
Understanding the Dugout Clubs announcement requires understanding just how unusual this relocation timeline actually is. Major League Baseball franchises don’t typically spend years playing in a city other than their eventual permanent home while marketing premium seating products for a stadium that exists only as a construction site and a set of architectural renderings.
The Athletics’ path to Las Vegas began in earnest when MLB permitted the Oakland franchise in 2021 to explore relocation if a new ballpark agreement with Oakland fell through. By April 2023, those Oakland negotiations had definitively collapsed. The team then pursued, abandoned, and revised several different Las Vegas stadium concepts before settling on the current Tropicana site plan, with Nevada’s legislature ultimately approving the public funding package through Senate Bill 1 in a special legislative session.
In the interim, the Athletics have been playing as a nomadic franchise, splitting time and identity in ways that create genuine challenges for building fan loyalty. This week’s homestand at Las Vegas Ballpark in Summerlin against the Milwaukee Brewers, followed by a series against the Colorado Rockies, represents exactly the kind of relationship-building exercise the franchise needs: actual major league baseball, played in front of actual Las Vegas crowds, well before the permanent Strip ballpark exists.
The franchise even noted the symbolic resonance of returning to Las Vegas for these games thirty years after the Athletics previously played six regular-season games in the city back in 1996, a fact the team’s marketing has leaned into as evidence that this relationship, however slow-moving the formal relocation has been, has deeper roots than a simple business relocation decision.
What Locals Actually Get
For all the attention premium seating announcements generate, Badain’s commission testimony contained the detail that matters most for ordinary Las Vegas baseball fans: affordable ticketing deals for locals and families are coming, just not yet, and not with the same marketing fanfare currently being lavished on six-figure premium memberships.
That sequencing creates a real tension worth naming directly. Nevada taxpayers contributed $380 million in public funding toward this stadium, a substantial public investment that local officials and the Athletics justified partly on the promise that Major League Baseball would become a genuinely accessible part of the Las Vegas community, not simply another exclusive amenity layered onto a city already saturated with high-end entertainment options that price out many longtime residents.
The eventual answer to how accessible Athletics baseball actually becomes in Las Vegas will depend heavily on pricing decisions that haven’t been made public yet. Other MLB markets vary enormously in how they balance premium and standard seating, with some maintaining genuinely affordable upper-deck and outfield seating options even in stadiums with extensive luxury offerings, while others have drifted toward pricing structures that make attending games an occasional special event rather than routine entertainment for working-class and middle-class families.
Las Vegas, a city with substantial income inequality and a workforce heavily concentrated in hospitality and service jobs that don’t always pay wages compatible with premium sports entertainment, will be a genuine test case for whether a brand-new MLB franchise can build the kind of broad community attachment that sustains long-term attendance, or whether it becomes primarily a tourist and high-end local attraction layered into the Strip’s existing entertainment ecosystem.
The Priority Access Strategy
Tickets for the Dugout Clubs go on sale to the public later in June, but with an important gatekeeping mechanism: members of the Athletics’ Priority Access List get first opportunity to purchase before general availability opens.
This kind of tiered access list serves multiple purposes simultaneously. It rewards and locks in the earliest, most committed fans and corporate partners, who registered interest in Las Vegas Athletics tickets potentially years before any games were played there. It creates artificial scarcity and urgency that drives list signups from fans who don’t want to miss out on premium options. And it gives the franchise real-time data on demand intensity for different seating tiers well before the broader public sales process begins, informing pricing decisions for the seating tiers still to be announced.
For a franchise trying to build an entirely new fan base in a city it hasn’t permanently called home yet, that data is genuinely valuable. Las Vegas doesn’t have decades of Athletics fan tradition to draw on the way longtime franchise cities do. Every signal about what kind of seating, pricing, and experience actually generates demand in this specific market helps the team calibrate a launch strategy with limited historical precedent to rely on.
What This Means as 2028 Approaches
The Dugout Clubs announcement, taken on its own, is a relatively minor stadium operations story. Taken as part of the broader sequence of premium product rollouts, ballpark construction progress, and the team’s ongoing presence playing actual games in Las Vegas well ahead of the permanent move, it’s a useful window into how a major professional sports franchise actually builds a new market from scratch.
The Athletics are spending nearly three years methodically constructing both a physical stadium and a fan base simultaneously, using premium seating sales to fund construction while using actual gameplay in temporary venues to build the kind of community familiarity that ticket sales alone can’t generate.
Whether that strategy produces a financially successful and genuinely community-embraced franchise by the time the doors open in February 2028 remains an open question. What’s clear right now, in June 2026, is that the Athletics understand exactly which fans to court first, and they’re being entirely transparent that everyone else’s turn is coming later.
Key Insights
The sequential rollout of Athletic Club, Diamond Club, and now Dugout Club premium seating tiers reflects deliberate stadium financing strategy, generating confirmed revenue commitments that support the $2 billion construction budget before more accessible seating options are detailed publicly.
The $380 million in Nevada taxpayer funding toward stadium construction creates a legitimate public accountability question about whether premium-first marketing sequencing aligns with promises of broad community access to the franchise once it opens in 2028.
The Athletics’ unusual multi-year relocation timeline, including actual regular-season games played in Las Vegas well before the permanent ballpark exists, represents a deliberate strategy to build genuine fan familiarity and loyalty in a market without decades of existing franchise history.
Priority Access List gatekeeping for premium ticket sales provides the organization with real-time demand data across different price tiers, information that will likely shape pricing decisions for the broader, more accessible seating categories still to be announced.
Sources
News3 Las Vegas Dugout Clubs Coverage
FOX5 Vegas Dugout Club Details
Las Vegas Review-Journal Stadium Financing
Athletics Official Ballpark Experience Site
8 News Now Construction Update
