The Dallas Cowboys are breaking ground on a $2 billion mixed-use development across 60 acres adjacent to AT&T Stadium in Arlington, the largest real estate bet the Jones family has placed since opening The Star in Frisco nine years ago. The project—residential towers, hotel rooms, retail, and office space—marks the Cowboys' second attempt to extract non-football revenue from land they control, this time at the stadium itself rather than the practice facility.
The Star in Frisco opened in 2017 on 91 acres and now generates an estimated $350 million annually in retail, hospitality, and event revenue, none of which flows through NFL revenue-sharing. The Cowboys own the land. The city of Frisco issued bonds to fund infrastructure. Omni Hotels, Nebraska Furniture Mart, and a dozen restaurant tenants pay rent. The model works because families drive two hours to watch training camp, then stay for dinner. AT&T Stadium hosts 8 NFL games a year, plus Cowboys Stadium Tours and the occasional college matchup. The question is whether gameday traffic eight Sundays a year can anchor the same hospitality density that daily practice access sustains in Frisco.
Arlington owns AT&T Stadium, not the Cowboys. The city financed the $1.2 billion venue in 2009 with municipal bonds backed by ticket taxes, hotel occupancy levies, and rental-car surcharges. The Cowboys hold a long-term lease and keep naming rights revenue—Bank of America pays an estimated $17 million annually for the AT&T Stadium deal that runs through 2030. The new development sits on land the Cowboys control under separate agreements, which means construction proceeds without the revenue-sharing constraints that apply to gate receipts and shared sponsorship categories. Jerry Jones has said publicly he models the Arlington project on SoFi Stadium's Hollywood Park, where Stan Kroenke is building a $5 billion mixed-use district on 298 acres in Inglewood. The difference: Kroenke owns the stadium. Jones leases it.
The immediate pressure is naming rights renewal. Bank of America's deal expires in four years, and no stadium naming agreement has renewed above $20 million annually without a significant venue upgrade or district-level amenity package. The new development gives the Cowboys a sellable narrative: a sponsor buys into a district, not just a building. The risk is construction timelines. The Star took three years from groundbreaking to certificate of occupancy. If the Arlington project follows that pace, the first buildings open in 2028, two years past the Bank of America deadline. Naming rights deals are negotiated 18 to 24 months before expiration. The pitch deck needs renderings, not dirt.
Three things happen next. The Cowboys file for construction permits in Arlington, which will surface the tax-increment financing structure and reveal whether the city is contributing infrastructure dollars. Bank of America's naming rights team—separate from their Cowboys sponsorship group—begins internal discussions on renewal, likely before the end of 2026. And the Cowboys' real estate division, led by COO Stephen Jones, starts pre-leasing retail and hotel space, using The Star's tenant list as a prospecting map. The first signed anchor tenant will tell you whether this is Frisco 2.0 or a $2 billion bet that gameday is enough.