Remember when the Dallas Cowboys were just “America’s Team”? Well, those days are long gone. Now, they’ve become America’s Fortune 500 franchise dressed in silver and blue. Just last summer, they made history as the first pro sports team to hit a $10 billion valuation. But fast forward to 2025, and the game looks very different.
The Celtics are sitting at $6.1 billion, the Lakers have officially joined the $10 billion club, and the Cowboys? They’re on another level. They blew past $11 billion, then $12 billion, and now sit at $13 billion. In one year alone, their value jumped 29%, and since 2021, they’ve doubled.
The business of winning per Forbes:
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$1.2B in revenue last year
Super low debt-to-value ratio: 2%
Even the low-end seats are costly today: Bengals are worth 5.25B, beating almost every NBA, MLB, and NHL team. Putting it into perspective, Dallas is worth nearly $13B, which is nearly double the amount of Manchester United ($6.6B) and the New York Yankees ($8.2B). And the middle of all this empire is Jerry Jones: owner, president, and general manager. In 1989, he purchased the Cowboys for $140M from Harvey Roberts “Bum” Bright.
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Today, his net worth sits at $19.8B. Jones did not simply purchase a team; he created the most valuable sports franchise on the planet. However, what is the secret of this dominance?
The money machine behind the Cowboys
A huge part of the Cowboys’ financial dominance comes from AT&T Stadium, which opened in 2009 at a cost of $1.2B. Although the Dallas Cowboys incur an annual rent of $2M, and the revenue from the naming rights of $500K, the stadium is not merely a place where football is played, but it is also a source of revenue.
It is not only the home of NFL games with a capacity of 100,000 fans. It can be called the home of Super Bowl XLV, college championships, WrestleMania, and concerts of such stars as Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.
In all the angles, money flows:
Luxury suites fetch around $22K-58K per game
More than 30 headline events annually
City income – Arlington gathers approximately $55M annually in taxes.
And it is not only the effect in dollars. In 2025, Arlington paid its $22.6M debt on the stadium ten years ahead, to the tune of $150M in interest. It is strategic infrastructure at its best, transforming a stadium into a real financial machine, but what drives the rest of the empire?
Not your usual sponsorship
Consider AT&T Stadium to be the vault, and the sponsorships to be the bars of gold locked up there. The Cowboys also brought in more than $100 million in sponsor money in 2024, an increase of approximately $60 million over the league average. And the secret? They do not simply put logos on walls. They introduce brands into the world of Cowboys. But how?
AT&T spends between $17 -$19M annually on naming rights, Pepsi has run fan giveaways and activations, Ford has pushed co-branded cars, and Molson Coors has paid $200M on a 10-year beer deal. Include some LG stadium screen displays and some flashy advertisements of Aristocrat Gaming. That is the reason why Dallas is miles ahead. Result? $1.2B in revenue, NFL record operating profit of $629M and a financial model every other team can only imagine.
Dallas turns blueprint into a business model
The Dallas Cowboys not only created a football team, but they also created a blueprint or model to succeed, and now everybody is emulating it. It is a full-scale competition of who is going to be the one to join them in the exclusive club of $10B. And who are the latest to get across the track? The New York Giants and the Los Angeles Rams.
The Rams are the loudest echo of the Cowboys’ strategy. Just like Dallas transformed AT&T Stadium into an entertainment powerhouse, the Rams went even bigger. Their $5 billion SoFi Stadium wasn’t designed just for football games. It was built to host mega-events like the Super Bowl, concerts, and even the World Cup- turning the venue into a money-making machine. That move helped them leap from a $7.6B valuation last year to $10.5B this year.
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Not to be outdone, the Giants also made a huge jump. Thanks to their partnership with the Jets in the $1.6 billion MetLife Stadium, they’ve been seeing steady growth. Add in the recent sale of a 10% minority stake to the Koch family, and the Giants’ value has skyrocketed from $7.3B to $10B in just one year.
That is the winning formula that everyone is seeking: new stadiums, huge sponsorship deals, and hosting huge events. Other teams are now finally catching up with the Cowboys playbook, but here is the stinger: Dallas is still ahead of them. They are not merely playing football, and they are controlling the whole sports business.