The maximum attendance at AT&T Stadium in Dallas wasn’t for a Cowboys game

AT&T Stadium is home to the Dallas Cowboys. Built in 2009, the stadium is a product of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones’ vision, who saw the project as a full-on events center, able to host small and large-scale events. With a seating capacity of 80,000, but expandable to over 100,000 with standing room, AT&T Stadium achieved that feat.

With a stadium that boasts high-end art, a shopping mall, a 4K video board that, at the time the stadium opened, was the largest HDTV screen in the world, a retractable roof, and a convertible turf system that allows for 26 interchangeable panels to host all kinds of diverse events, AT&T Stadium quickly became a popular events center.

Also known as Jerry World or The Death Star, the stadium hosts not just Cowboys games, but also college football games, concerts, basketball and soccer games, boxing matches, and has even been host to weddings, movie premiers, and The National Bowling Championship.

AT&T’s record attendance

It may not be so shocking then to learn that the record attendance set at AT&T Stadium wasn’t actually for a Cowboys game. That record actually belongs to the NBA All-Star Game in 2010 with a crowd of 108,713 in attendance. That game also set the record for the highest-attended basketball game in history, setting a new Guiness World Record..

The record attendance set for a football game at AT&T Stadium was 105,121 when the Cowboys played NFC East foes the New York Giants on September 20, 2009.

The Cowboys attempted to set a record for attendance at a Super Bowl game when they hosted Super Bowl XLV in 2011 when the Green Bay Packers defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, but that didn’t quite go as planned. They attempted to increase the seating capacity to 105,000, but during the construction to add more seats, seven construction workers were injured during an ice storm. Just hours before the Super Bowl kicked off, over 1,200 seats were blocked off for safety reasons and the seats were not finished in time to be properly inspected. Around 800 people were given other seats but about 400 were not. Those 400 were instead compensated with free tickets to the Super Bowl the following year and a letter from the NFL that could be exchanged for three times the face value of the original ticket. Over 1,000 displaced fans joined a lawsuit against the league, the Cowboys, and Jerry Jones, and the attendance of 103,219 fell short by 766 of the record set in Super Bowl XIV.