ARLINGTON – The curtains came down in the middle of a World Cup match, and Jerry Jones took notice.
AT&T Stadium opened in 2009 as the most expensive NFL venue ever built – $1.3 billion, and running east to west by design. Jones chose the orientation so that the setting Texas sun would pour through the west-facing glass panels during late-afternoon games, producing the kind of visual effect that had never been available in a domed stadium. He got the image. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, which hosted matches at AT&T Stadium this summer, handed him the complication.
FIFA required the stadium to close its curtains during at least one World Cup match because the afternoon sun was interfering with play. That is the operational cost of the choice Jones made seventeen years ago: the aesthetic he wanted for television has a threshold, and professional soccer officials found it.
Now, Jones says he is at least considering a middle-ground fix.
“Thinking about it and doing something about it are two different things,” the Cowboys owner told Dallas station KDFW Fox 4 this week. “I’ll think about it.” He added that the sun’s behavior was not a fixed variable – the angle shifts across the NFL calendar in ways that make any solution more complicated than it looks. “The sun’s not the same,” he said. “The angle of that sun changes from September through year-round.”
Currently, the stadium operates on a binary: either the west-facing panels stay open, letting in the full effect Jones designed the building around, or the curtains come down and the aesthetic disappears entirely. Tinting would represent a middle option – less dramatic than either extreme, but capable of managing the glare while preserving some of the visual character Jones spent $1.3 billion to build.
“I like some of the effects of the tinting,” Jones told Fox 4. “And so we’re giving that a thought.”
Teams playing at AT&T Stadium in late-afternoon windows have long factored the sun angle into their approach. The effect is particularly acute in September and October, when the NFL calendar and the Texas sunset most frequently overlap at the worst possible angle, and teams choose which goal to defend in the second half with the light conditions in mind. For seventeen seasons, that was a quirk of the building both teams absorbed. The World Cup added a new dimension: a global audience and officials operating under FIFA’s standards rather than the NFL’s tolerance for architectural idiosyncrasies. When FIFA required the curtains drawn, it formalized a problem that Cowboys home games had always informally managed around.
Window tinting on a structure the size of AT&T Stadium is not a straightforward retrofit. The glass panels are a central architectural feature of the building – designed to be visible from outside and to produce the distinctive light effect Jones specified when the venue was designed. Whatever product would address the glare would also permanently alter the character of those windows. That is the trade Jones is now weighing, and why “thinking about it” has not yet become “doing something about it.”
AT&T Stadium has hosted a Super Bowl, multiple Final Fours, major concerts, and boxing events in the years before the World Cup. It has also hosted complaints about the afternoon sun in virtually every year since it opened. The World Cup, with its international standards and its mandatory curtains directive, was the first time an outside organization formally required Jones to address the issue mid-event rather than leaving it to the teams and officials to absorb.
The NFL season that kicks off in September will return AT&T Stadium to its original purpose. The Cowboys open at home. As NBC Sports reported, Jones is thinking about the windows. He has not committed to when the thinking turns into something else.
This week Jones has been discussing more than window glass. The Cowboys owner also publicly defended broadcaster Tony Romo following his OWI arrest in Milwaukee, telling KDFW that Romo’s character was something he trusted and that their two decades of shared history – first as player and executive, now as executive and broadcaster – informed his view. CBS Sports placed Romo on leave without a return date, with J.J. Watt in the booth as his replacement. The Eastern Herald covered the full details of the Romo arrest and CBS Sports’ response earlier this week.
What Jones decides about the windows at AT&T Stadium will follow the same logic he has applied to every decision about the building: the image first, the operational reality arranged around it wherever possible. Seventeen seasons of managing the sun problem in-house were manageable. A World Cup match where FIFA managed it for him was something different.
Whether that distinction is enough to move Jones from thinking to acting is the question he has not yet answered.
