Advertisement

Business

How Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones turned a money-losing team into a $10 billion empire

He’s a master salesman who’s unafraid to challenge the way things are done. And in the process, he’s left an imprint on North Texas.

It’s hard to imagine the vast business empire of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones getting its start with a bow-tied young boy greeting shoppers at the entrance of a North Little Rock supermarket.

Yet he’s fond of retelling how his mom would give him a wink when a known tipper entered his parents’ grocery store, a subtle clue to push the customer’s cart and collect the reward. He considers it one of the valuable lessons learned 70-plus years ago that still apply today, even as he directs a collection of companies bearing names mostly tied to the famed blue star logo of his NFL team or his family name.

Those businesses make Jones one of the world’s richest people, with a net worth that billionaire trackers Forbes and Bloomberg estimate to be in the $10 billion range.

Advertisement

Jones’ success in turning a $140 million investment in a money-losing team in 1989 into the most valuable brand in sports also catapulted him out of the oil patch and into a luxury suite in one of the most exclusive clubs in America — the 32 owners of NFL teams that, in many ways, shape the psyche of the cities they represent.

Business Briefing

Become a business insider with the latest news.

Or with:

Since then, he’s spared little expense in his three-decade quest to build what today is the most valuable sports franchise on the planet. And through real estate, he’s poured billions of dollars back into North Texas with developments that attract other businesses to invest so they can be associated with the Cowboys brand.

“Jerry Jones and his businesses generate not only opportunities for area residents and businesses, but also put the North Texas region in the national spotlight in a very positive way,” said Ray Perryman, an economist who has long studied Texas’ growth.

Advertisement

Sunday’s playoff game against the San Francisco 49ers in Arlington puts the national spotlight on unfinished business for Jones. It has been 26 years since the Cowboys capped off a season as Super Bowl champs.

At 79, Jones’ influence makes him the Jeff Bezos of sports, with ventures touching every facet of the industry, from food and beverages to medical imaging to helping negotiate lucrative TV deals that propelled professional football beyond its rivals. He pioneered the moneymaking potential of sponsorships, creating dozens of “official” brands of the Cowboys for everything from guacamole to casinos.

“Jerry is one of the greatest business disruptors in the history of sports,” Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban wrote to The Dallas Morning News in an email. “When he got into the NFL, he looked at the way things were always done, saw a better way [and] made it happen.”

Advertisement

Jones declined through a spokesman to be interviewed for this story. But in a video interview with The News in 2017 when he was inducted into the NFL Hall of Fame, Jones said he always carried an “exaggerated view of what the NFL and sports could be. I always thought it could be bigger than life.”

Here’s how that bigger-than-life ambition built a far-reaching legacy for Jones, wife Gene, sons Stephen and Jerry Jr. and daughter Charlotte that’s visible throughout Dallas-Fort Worth and beyond.

Before the Cowboys: The early years

Dabbling in business while playing football at the University of Arkansas in the 1960s, Jones honed his skills by selling life insurance to businessmen and shoes to students in fraternities, earning him the nickname “the Razorback businessman,” he wrote in a 2012 article for Forbes. He also owned a small interest in several oil wells.

While still in college, Jones had an opportunity to get into the fast-food business with either Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s or Shakey’s Pizza Parlor, the first franchise pizza chain in the U.S that peaked in the 1970s. He picked Shakey’s, which once had at least seven locations in Dallas-Fort Worth, all of which shuttered by 1989. He borrowed $1 million from the Teamsters union to get started.

“The rationale was every restaurant in the world makes a hamburger — that’s McDonald’s,” Jones said on a Talk of Fame Network podcast in 2016. “And everybody knows you cook fried chicken at home so Kentucky Fried’s not the deal. But how can you beat that pizza? Of course, that was the wrong choice out of the three.”

Advertisement

When Shakey’s didn’t turn out how he thought it would, Jones went to work with his father, Pat, who had gone from supermarket owner to highly successful insurance salesman. Jerry Jones was executive vice president at Modern Security Life in Springfield, Mo. When the company was sold in 1970, he walked away with $500,000, according to The Oklahoman.

In 1966, just a year out of college, Jones considered buying the financially ailing San Diego Chargers but ended up backing out after his dad warned him against taking on that much debt.

Jones shifted his focus to exploratory oil drilling through Arkansas-based Jones Oil and Land Lease. He struck oil in 12 of his first 13 wells, with the first well yielding $4 million in oil, according to the book The Dallas Cowboys: The Outrageous History of the Biggest, Loudest, Most Hated, Best Loved Football Team in America.

That set up his next big move.

Advertisement
Jerry Jones took a question during a 1989 news conference at Valley Ranch in Irving when he...
Jerry Jones took a question during a 1989 news conference at Valley Ranch in Irving when he was announced as the Dallas Cowboys' new owner. Tex Schramm (standing) and H.R. "Bum" Bright (seated) are in the background.(Richard Michael Pruitt / Staff photographer)

‘America’s team’

In 1989, at age 46, Jones bought the Cowboys for $140 million from team owner and friend H.R. “Bum” Bright in the largest deal at the time for an NFL team. The price is equivalent to $302.6 million today.

The Cowboys are now the NFL’s richest team, with $980 million in revenue and operating income of $425 million in 2020, according to Forbes. The team’s overall value is $6.5 billion in Forbes’ latest ranking — or nearly two-thirds of Jones’ estimated net worth.

Advertisement

“Plenty of owners were more wealthy than Jones was when he acquired the Cowboys, so you have to assume [his success] is due to the force of his personality,” said Jonathan Jensen, a former executive with sports marketing agencies in global advertising networks Omnicom and Publicis Groupe. “The things he has already accomplished are things most in professional sports would have said were impossible 20 years ago.”

Jones and wife Gene own 51% of the Cowboys and their three adult children equally share the other 49%, D magazine reported in 2019. The sons and daughter also are significant partners in all other family endeavors.

With “America’s Team” in his possession, Jones set out to leverage the Cowboys’ frequent TV appearances, their perennial superstars and iconic cheerleaders, and their knack for winning into other revenue-generating ventures.

Cowboys owner Jerry Jones (right) raised a Miller Lite with Molson Coors partnerships chief...
Cowboys owner Jerry Jones (right) raised a Miller Lite with Molson Coors partnerships chief Adam Dettman in September to toast a 10-year extension of the team's deal with the beer brand. (Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)
Advertisement

One of his biggest playing field-changing moves came in 1995 when he rocked the NFL, bypassing the league’s collegial revenue-sharing agreement and striking his own lucrative sponsorship deals at Texas Stadium, the team’s former home in Irving. Until then, NFL Properties had handled such deals and split profits evenly among teams.

He signed a 10-year deal with Pepsi-Cola worth $40 million, The Dallas Morning News reported. Then Nike agreed to pay $2.5 million a year to paint its logo on the stadium, collaborate with the team in building a Nike-Cowboys theme park outside the stadium and for Cowboys coaches to wear its now-ubiquitous attire, according to The New York Times.

Sponsorship deals and naming rights have soared in price since then. In September 2021, the Cowboys and Molson Coors announced a 10-year extension to an exclusive deal for a reported $200 million, according to Sports Business Journal.

Molson Coors, which owns Miller Lite, outbid AB InBev for the right to be the only beer sold at AT&T Stadium, the team’s current home some 20 miles west of Dallas in Arlington. The deal also includes Miller LiteHouse, an 87,000-square-foot event space adjacent to the west end of the stadium, and rights to use the Cowboys name to advertise its products in Dallas-Fort Worth.

Advertisement

Jensen, now a professor of sports administration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described the deal as “out of the stratosphere,” with Molson Coors paying a premium to block its rival Anheuser-Busch.

“The fact that the Cowboys could put together a local team sponsorship of $20 million a year is pretty astounding and speaks to the power of the Cowboys brand in North Texas,” Jensen said.

Its marquee sponsors — Ford, Miller Lite, Pepsi, Dr Pepper and Bank of America, among others — have ponied up big bucks for decades to be associated with the Cowboys.

A year after Jones pioneered team sponsorship deals, he began working on other ways to capitalize on the brand. He launched Dallas Cowboys Merchandising Ltd. to design, manufacture and distribute the team’s merchandise to retailers.

Advertisement

At the beginning of this season, sports business site Sportico projected the Cowboys’ locally generated revenue would reach $650 million, including merchandise and non-NFL events at AT&T Stadium.

Bravo Eugenia, the $250 million superyacht that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones purchased and...
Bravo Eugenia, the $250 million superyacht that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones purchased and named for his wife, Gene.(Ben Rotsap / Ben Rotsap Photography)

That success carries over into everything Jones does.

In 2016, he bought a custom Airbus helicopter to cut his commute from the Cowboys’ headquarters in Frisco to AT&T Stadium. It reduced a one-hour drive to a 13-minute ride. The aircraft, white with the Cowboys’ blue star stamped on the tail, was an H145 from Airbus Helicopters, a model that starts at $8.5 million. It can seat up to 10 people.

Advertisement

When the pandemic forced the 2020 NFL Draft to go virtual, Jones and crew made the Cowboys’ picks aboard his 357-foot-long, $250 million megayacht. Built in 2018 and named Bravo Eugenia after his wife, the yacht has two helicopter pads, a sauna, plunge pool, gym, garage and beach club.

Pizza, wings and (at one time) doughnuts

Heading into the 2004 season, Jones returned to his fast-food franchise roots with a joint venture between his Blue and Silver Ventures Ltd. and Louisville, Ky.-based Papa John’s. Under the deal, the limited partnership assumed 49% ownership of 71 Papa John’s restaurants in Texas, including locations in Dallas, Austin and Waco.

Advertisement

Papa John’s also became the official pizza of the Cowboys and a Texas Stadium sponsor. As part of the deal, the 71 restaurants would get special co-branded uniforms and delivery vehicles to tout the partnership.

At the end of 2015, Star Papa LP, the joint venture’s name, was involved with 87 Papa John’s locations in Texas, according to the pizza company’s SEC filings. When asked for a current figure, Papa John’s declined to answer but said 87 was “in the right ballpark.” In 2018, Stephen Jones said the team was linked to 50 stores in the Dallas area alone.

Jones also has a connection to Dallas-based Wingstop, which hired him and his former three-time Super Bowl champion and Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman to do a series of television commercials that first aired in the summer of 2009. Aikman had been Wingstop’s national spokesman since 2003 and was one of the company’s early investors. Wingstop was also the team’s exclusive chicken wing vendor under a five-year agreement.

“Some of my greatest conversations have been with Jerry Jones regarding business,” Aikman told The News. “No one I know has done it better. I have enormous respect for his tolerance of risk and willingness to double down when he senses an opportunity.”

Advertisement

In 2012, Aikman and the Jones family teamed up with Canton, Mass.-based Dunkin’ Brands Group in a highly publicized deal to open at least 50 restaurants in D-FW under a limited partnership, similar to the Papa John’s play. By 2014, only four locations had been opened. Two years later, the doughnut brand and Jones and Aikman mutually decided to end the partnership.

Fireworks flew in 2009 as Arlington Mayor Robert Cluck and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones...
Fireworks flew in 2009 as Arlington Mayor Robert Cluck and Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones pushed a lever to open what was initially called Cowboys Stadium.(Tom Fox / Staff photographer)

New stadium, new opportunities

In 2009, Jones moved his team into the NFL’s first billion-dollar stadium.

Advertisement

The venue, dubbed “Jerry World” by sports media and fans, cost $1.2 billion, took four years to construct and seats 80,000 to 105,000 fans. Besides Cowboys games, it regularly hosts other major events, such as the 2011 Super Bowl, the 2014 NCAA Final Four, the 2015 College Football Playoff National Championship, the 2015 Academy of Country Music Awards and this year’s upcoming WrestleMania.

“These concerts and games lead thousands of people to come to the area, spending money in regional hotels and motels, restaurants, bars, retail stores and gasoline stations,” said Perryman, CEO of The Perryman Group, his Waco economic research firm.

But it took four years before Cowboys Stadium found a sponsor with enough cachet for a naming rights deal. In 2013, Jones sold those rights to Dallas-based AT&T in a deal that reportedly brings in $17 million to $19 million a year for the club.

The stadium didn’t skimp on the glamour, with more than 300 suites, a retractable roof and two center-hung sideline TVs that measure 160 feet wide and 72 feet tall. The two screens create a $40 million jumbotron.

Advertisement

Though the stadium is owned by the city of Arlington, which sought voter approval of $325 million in bonds to build it, Jones pays $2 million a year to rent it, plus 5% a year from his AT&T naming rights deal up to $500,000.

With a new showplace to call home, Jones went looking for ways to expand the Cowboys’ reach.

In 2008, as the stadium was being built and the New York Yankees were developing their own new ballpark, Jones teamed up with the baseball club’s then-owner George Steinbrenner to launch hospitality management business Legends. It started as an operator of concessions and merchandise sales at the two new stadiums and grew into a full-service sports marketing powerhouse that now works with other NFL teams, colleges and venues across the world.

Last year, global investment firm Sixth Street bought a majority stake in Legends in a deal that put a $1.3 billion value on the hospitality business, according to The Wall Street Journal. According to Sportico’s reporting on the deal, Sixth Street took a 51% stake and the Cowboys and Yankees split the remaining 49%.

Advertisement

Legends’ emergence represented a significant shift in how sports teams operated, Jensen said.

“Twenty years ago, if anyone working in sports would have said to hire a firm from a different team to help negotiate sponsorships, people would have said, ‘That’s absurd. Why would one pro sports team hire another pro sports team to work on their behalf?’” Jensen said.

Jones applied the same kind of business model to merchandising, forming Silver Star Merchandising, which later became 289c Apparel, in 2009 as an affiliate of Dallas Cowboys Merchandising. 289c Apparel focuses on merchandise sales for major colleges and universities, growing out of a college football classic staged at AT&T Stadium. In 2011, the University of Southern California was the first university to sign on with a 10-year agreement. Jerry Jones Jr. is executive vice president of the company that has more than 350 employees, according to its website.

In 2017, Jerry Jones capitalized on the nation’s fitness consciousness by launching Cowboys Fit, a 60,000-square-foot luxury gym at the team’s Frisco headquarters. It boasts equipment used by Cowboys athletes, group fitness classes, a cycling room, a heated rooftop pool and a recovery lounge featuring cryotherapy machines, hydromassage and other treatments.

Advertisement

Cowboys Fit later opened three other locations in Plano, Dallas and Pflugerville. Membership for the Frisco location is about $95 a month while the downtown Dallas location is about $50 a month.

The Star in Frisco frequently hosts community events, such as Cowboys Christmas Extravaganza...
The Star in Frisco frequently hosts community events, such as Cowboys Christmas Extravaganza in 2021.(Stewart F. House / Special Contributor)

Real estate and The Star

Real estate is as much a part of Jones’ business life as is his team.

Advertisement

His development firm, Blue Star Land, got its start in 1994 when it bought a 550-acre home community in Frisco called Starwood, according to an interview Blue Star president Joe Hickman did with a University of Arkansas business school podcast in 2020. Hickman knew Stephen Jones in college and moved to Dallas to work with the family.

Blue Star’s best-known project is The Star in Frisco, the 91-acre campus that houses the Cowboys’ headquarters and its practice facility. It cost $1.5 billion to build. The headquarters alone is valued for tax purposes at just under $225 million, according to Collin County property records.

The site also features a 300-room Omni Hotel, a Baylor Scott & White sports therapy and research center, and a private social club and restaurant called the Cowboys Club.

The Star was a public-private partnership with the city of Frisco. The Ford Center, a 12,000-seat indoor stadium that’s also used by Frisco ISD football teams and hosts events including the USA Gymnastics Winter Cup and the Cowboys’ annual Christmas celebrations, is owned by the city but managed and maintained by the Cowboys.

Advertisement

Office space overlooking The Star’s outdoor practice field includes a 17-story, 350,000-square-foot tower that acts as the regional headquarters for Keurig Dr Pepper and a six-story, 398,000-square-foot building anchored by the Cowboys’ home office.

Blue Star and Dallas-based Lincoln Property Co. are planning to build another 11-story, $65 million office building at The Star that’s set to open in early 2023.

In an interview with Sportico, Cowboys chief operating officer Stephen Jones said he thinks anything built at The Star site would have been successful because of its location in one of the fastest-growing areas of North Texas. But adding the Cowboys brand to the project “supersized it,” giving the club the ability to charge premium rates for office and retail space, he said.

Blue Star Land and Lincoln Property Co. are building the Gates of Prosper shopping center at...
Blue Star Land and Lincoln Property Co. are building the Gates of Prosper shopping center at U.S. 380 and Preston Road in Prosper.(DMN files )
Advertisement

The Dallas North Tollway has propelled growth even farther north from The Star. Jones began buying land around the intersection of U.S. Highway 380 and Preston Road in the early 1990s, blocking up more than 800 acres.

In 2015, Blue Star Land began two developments in nearby Prosper called the Gates of Prosper and Star Trail.

The Gates of Prosper is a mixed-use development featuring a large shopping center with nearly 800,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space. Tenants include Walmart, Old Navy and Dick’s Sporting Goods. A 344-unit rental community is expected to open in 2023 on the property.

Star Trail is a community of more than 1,800 homes sitting on a little over 900 acres with home prices ranging from $500,000 to more than $1 million.

Advertisement

In 2018, Blue Star Land bought a 200-acre business park in Frisco in a deal valued at almost $38 million and renamed it Star Business Park. Tenants at the industrial development off Preston Road and south of U.S. 380 include Amazon, international technology firm GEA Group and Magnus Chemical. It’s also home to a 400,000-square-foot Dallas Cowboys Merchandising Distribution and Sales Center.

Just recently, Blue Star Land bought an additional 88-acre tract next to the business park.

The Cowboys have won five Super Bowl titles, including three during Jerry Jones' ownership....
The Cowboys have won five Super Bowl titles, including three during Jerry Jones' ownership. In this 2015 photo, he's holding his first Super Bowl trophy, won in 1993.(Vernon Bryant / Staff Photographer)

Eyes on the prize

With the playoffs underway, the Jones family’s attention is on the ultimate goal — hoisting the Vince Lombardi Trophy in the air at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles on Feb. 13.

Advertisement

Playoff games can generate several million dollars in additional revenue for host teams — derived from fans paying to park on game day to extra spending on everything from beer and hot dogs to expensive licensed jerseys. But that pales to the roughly $400 million the Cowboys and every other NFL team expect to receive this year from the league’s equally shared TV revenue.

Sports valuation experts see the Cowboys’ revenue topping $1 billion this year, making it the first North American sports franchise to hit that mark. So what would a Super Bowl win mean for revenue?

“We’ve used such numbers as 50% going forward,” Stephen Jones told Sportico at the start of this season. “It has such an effect when you win a championship. We saw it when we first bought the team, how people get even more excited. They pull their Cowboys jerseys out of their drawers; they were closet Cowboys fans because we weren’t winning, and then you win and here they come.”

During a radio interview last week, Jerry Jones was asked if it’s championship or bust this year for the Cowboys.

Advertisement

“Oh, unquestionably,” he responded. “There’s no in-between. … You don’t have but one winner here, and that’s the Super Bowl winner.”

Note: An earlier version of this story identified the Jones family supermarket as being in Little Rock. It was in North Little Rock.