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Inside America's Newfound Sports Capital
June 12, 2025 | Edition #18
Hey there!
Frisco is almost a physical embodiment of ‘Leap of faith’. This sleepy farming town was what the tag suggested–a run-of-the-mill nothing-happens-here place. Two decades later, its unofficial tagline reads: ‘Sports City, USA’. In today’s edition, we are breaking down the Frisco success story. We also have exclusive insights from David Steele, Director, Plug and Play Frisco–Sportstech, on how they are transforming the North Texas town into a Mini Silicon Valley.
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Today’s TLDR:
✨ How Frisco Became Synonymous with Sports and Tech
🚀 How Plug and Play Bridged the Gap Between Startups and Sports
📖 The stories shaping the industry (and the lessons we learned this week)
Let’s dive in. 🚀
Frisco wasn’t always on the sports map. But in the last three decades, it’s gone from a small Texas town to the epicenter of sports innovation. Welcome to 'Sports City USA,' where sports franchises and startups collide, and the future of sports is being redefined. Frisco is home to:
20,500-seat Toyota Stadium
12,000-seat Ford Center
7,000-seat venue Comerica Center
PGA of America HQ, Dallas Cowboys HQ
Moreover, over 350 startups and around $6B+ in venture capital activity have sprung up in the region, with around 99 sportstech-specific startups.
The rapid growth can be traced to three key factors:
🤝Strategic partnerships: Forward-thinking deals between the city council and the Frisco Independent School District (FISD) and professional teams. So, such world-class sports franchises, drawn by incentives, are moving their headquarters to North Texas.
🤾♀️Youth sports investment: Frisco also targeted the youth sports market, a multi-billion-dollar industry. The Ford Center regularly hosts national youth tournaments in basketball, volleyball, and football, like the Frisco Bowl.
🛠️Innovative approach: Frisco is also home to sports tech companies, data analytics startups, like Altium, Bounteous, Gearbox Software, and Complexity Gaming etc.
Frisco has also provided enough incentive to draw in top sports franchises.
Why the PGA of America and the Dallas Cowboys moved their HQs to Frisco
The PGA of America had offers from Palm Beach and Florida. “Frisco's jumped off the page for a couple of reasons. One is the financial incentives of Texas, a very business-forward place. They get the entire state behind it,” CEO Seth Waugh told Local Profile.
✅ Frisco had a 650-acre area that the PGA of America could use.
✅ The city provided $74 million in performance incentives.
✅ Texas allowed the PGA of America to run without sales, hotel, and mixed beverage taxes, amounting to $62M.
Speaking of Frisco, Waugh then added: “This is a destination where we can really get a return on our investment here in a way that we can't elsewhere.” Similarly, the Dallas Cowboys moved their HQ to Frisco for a few reasons:
The old HQ lacked space for expansion, had limited fan engagement capability, and very little opportunity for commercial development potential.
The Ford Center is a 12,000-seat indoor stadium that was to be shared between the Cowboys and Frisco ISD.
It allowed the Cowboys to gain access to a market with younger, affluent, and dedicated aspiring stars.
Frisco’s ecosystem includes corporate partners such as the Dallas Cowboys, PGA of America, PepsiCo, Mavericks, and Stars. The city also hosts flagship events (e.g., ACTIV Sports Summit), powered by Plug & Play, Comcast SportsTech, and major stakeholders, which launched innovative pilots.
Notably, Plug & Play sources 500–600 startups biannually, with venture associates vetting and pairing select companies with high-profile sports brands. This creates a structured B2B collaboration model, offering startups access to networked investment and market validation. To explore how Frisco’s success story might inspire other cities and revolutionize sports tech, we caught up with David Steele of Plug and Play Tech Center.
But before we move on to the exclusive interview, tell us this:
Should More Sports Franchises Relocate to Smaller Towns? |
Sports franchises have established networks and structured frameworks that startups rarely break into. So, for sports tech innovators, getting through the door is a huge challenge.
Enters Plug and Play.
They connect change makers with industry leaders, fostering the right environment for growth. Plug and Play Frisco currently:
Boasts a portfolio of over 33 unicorn startups.
Hosts sports-specific virtual sessions 2-3 times a week.
Established a 6000 sq. ft innovation hub near Ford Center.
The reason for this focus on new-age startups? The sports tech industry is on a dream run, as one look at these numbers below will tell you:
This underscores the immense potential and growth trajectory of this industry. And Plug and Play Frisco has positioned itself at the center of it. Their goal is ‘to bring that next unicorn out of Frisco, North Texas.’
Steele notes that the Soccer World Cup is coming to the States in less than a year. Then you have the 2028 LA Olympics. These high-voltage events are to sportstech startups what Davos is to Fortune 500 companies. So, the Sports Innovation Hub will become ‘a landing location for them [international brands] to be in three hours from wherever they want to be in the state.’
They are already on the right track:
🎯 35-40 hot desks in place.
🎯 Family offices, venture capital firms have already moved in.
🎯 The University of North Texas is on board.
The stated agenda is deceptively simple: to build a holistic ecosystem. Steele explained, “We are able to help tap into not only the network they have, but the network we have from our 45 intentional offices, really to kind of help them understand how to do business in the States from a sports standpoint.” Because the business structure on this side of the Atlantic is markedly different.
Models are different. Engagements are different. Extreme high pay-to-play model here Stateside. So, the program is really developed to bring these companies here and help them develop and grow out.
By connecting startups with sports franchises, Plug and Play is not only advancing innovation but also reshaping the teams themselves. In a world where data is the new oil, innovative startups help teams stay ahead of the curve, with Plug and Play quietly driving this change behind the scenes.
You can catch the entire episode below:
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