The Las Vegas Raiders: A Brief Guide to the Team’s Local Roots

The Las Vegas Raiders are a National Football League team representing the Las Vegas metropolitan area. They compete in the American Football Conference’s West division, play home games at Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada, and maintain their headquarters in Henderson.

The franchise dates to January 30, 1960, when it was established in Oakland, California. The team played its first regular-season game later that year, on September 11, as an original member of the American Football League. A decade later, the Raiders entered the NFL when the AFL and NFL merged in 1970.

The club’s name and visual identity were not entirely settled at the beginning. One early possibility was a nickname built around the word “Señors,” and the team initially used orange and black before moving away from those colors. Those details belong to the franchise’s Oakland beginnings, before the organization developed the identity more widely associated with the Raiders.

The team’s history also includes more than one change of home city. The Raiders left Oakland for Los Angeles for the 1982 through 1994 seasons, competing during that period as the Los Angeles Raiders. At the beginning of the 1995 season, the franchise returned to Oakland.

The next major relocation step came in 2017. On March 27 of that year, NFL owners voted by an overwhelming margin to approve the Raiders’ application to move to the Las Vegas metropolitan area. The move made Southern Nevada the franchise’s current base and connected the team to a new stadium in Paradise and a headquarters in Henderson.

That arrangement gives the Raiders a regional footprint spread across several municipalities rather than a single address. The team is identified with Las Vegas, plays in Paradise, and is headquartered in Henderson. Together, those locations place the franchise within the broader metropolitan area named in its current identity.

For readers tracing the Raiders’ story, the essential arc is one of continuity through relocation: an Oakland beginning in the AFL, entry into the NFL after the leagues merged, a Los Angeles chapter, a return to Oakland, and eventual approval to establish the team in the Las Vegas area. The franchise’s present-day name reflects that latest home while its history retains the earlier cities that shaped it.

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Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://web.archive.org/web/20061230172729/http://www.raiders.com/history/gm11.jsp - https://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0918/112.html - https://web.archive.org/web/20070123200328/http://www.nfl.com/insider/2001/raidersnewhouse_091801.html - https://web.archive.org/web/20070930014708/http://msn.foxsports.com/nfl/story/949168 - https://www.usatoday.com/sports/football/nfl/2007-01-16-dungy-lovie_x.htm - https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE4DE133AF931A25754C0A963958260 Image rights Photograph description: An aerial view of Interstate 15 in the Las Vegas Area. Portions of Las Vegas Boulevard, also known as the Las Vegas Strip, are on the right of the image. The large pot near the center of the image is the location of the under-construction new stadium for the NFL's Raiders, who plan to move to Las Vegas in 2019. Creator: Ken Lund from Reno, Nevada, USA. License: CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AInterstate_15_and_the_Las_Vegas_Strip%2C_Las_Vegas%2C_Nevada.jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.