Cotton Bowl

Fair Park in Dallas was built for exhibitions, and the ground at its edge still carries that logic: a bowl set inside a historic district, owned by the city, reached through the same gates as the fairgrounds. It opened in 1930 as Fair Park Stadium, took the name Cotton Bowl in 1936, and has never sold that name to a sponsor — deals were discussed in 2008 and again in 2020, and neither went through.

The shape came from a single player. A second deck went up in 1948, the east side was double-decked a year later, and the nickname stuck: the House That Doak Built. Everything since has been addition or subtraction on that frame — chair-backs took seats away in 1968, the 1994 World Cup work took more when the pitch was widened and AstroTurf gave way to natural grass, and a $57 million rebuild in 2008 pushed the ground past ninety thousand.

Six matches of the 1994 tournament were played here, four of them in Group C, with Germany against Belgium in the round of 16. The Gold Cup came in 1993 and returned in 2021.

The Cowboys used it from 1960 to 1971, and it staged the 1966 NFL Championship Game on New Year's Day 1967, when Green Bay beat them. FC Dallas passed through in two spells. The permanent fixture is the Red River meeting of Oklahoma and Texas — the attendance record of 96,009 was set there in October 2009. Dallas Trinity FC have played here since 2024.