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When it comes to pitched battles and high stakes, the NFL games this weekend have nothing on the NFL ownership meeting in Dallas on Thursday, when owners from the league's two teams in New York will try to convince their peers to finance part of a planned $1.2 billion stadium in New Jersey.

It will be a tough sell, though there's ample precedent for the request. Since 1999, when the NFL launched its stadium financing program, 10 teams have received a total of $773 million in loans from the league. (The loans are repaid by a combination of TV revenues and the visitors' share of the new stadium's club seats.) But the $300 million request by the Giants and Jets doubles the amount of any single previous grant.

Moreover, the proposed 80,000-seat building, to be constructed near the present Giants Stadium and completed in 2010, would have major economic ripple effects, league-wide. Located in the nation's biggest, richest market, the stadium will command huge prices for 200 luxury suites, corporate sponsorships and naming rights, making it a bonanza for the Giants and Jets, whose revenues are each projected to rise $100 million-plus a year. The effect is expected to swell total league revenues, on which the salary cap is based.

The NFL Players Association, whose approval also is required for stadium loan financing, has agreed to forego $800 million in cap increases over the first 15 years of the stadium's life. But that still wouldn't offset the total salary-cap effect. While the stadium will vault the Giants and Jets from mid-tier teams to the top tier in terms of revenues, it could hike every team's salary-cap by an estimated $2 million a year.

Low-revenue teams, already bridling at what they perceive to be economic disparities, will be hurling tough questions at the New York brass, headed by Giants president and CEO John Mara and Jets owner Woody Johnson. For starters, those two will be challenged on whether they even qualify for a $300 million loan. League rules limit the loan amount to $150 million per stadium. As joint developers and co-tenants of the Meadowlands facility, the Jets and Giants maintain they qualify for $150 million each.

"It's extremely political," says one financial adviser close to the process. "I don't know if [the application] makes it."

Helping hands

The NFL has never made a stadium loan as big as the $300 million the Jets and the Giants are requesting. Here are the previous totals: 1999: Denver, $50 million 1999: New England, $150 million 1999: Philadelphia, $150 million 2000: Detroit, $100 million 2000: Seattle, $50 million 2000: Chicago, $100 million 2001: Green Bay, $13 million 2001: Arizona, $50 million 2005: Dallas, $76.5 million 2005: Indianapolis, $34 million

Approval requires the backing of 24 of the 32 NFL owners.

While the Jets and Giants would get private financing for the remainder of the $1.2 billion tab, Mara and Johnson have indicated the NFL's $300 million contribution is crucial. They maintain they can't go forward without it. The owners declined comment on the Thursday meeting; but Alice McGillion, a spokeswoman for the stadium project, previously has said, "We are confident that when the analysis is completed, our [application] will be approved."

The backdrop to the stadium situation is unresolved revenue-sharing issues. Back in March, when the NFL was trying to reach a new labor deal, then-commissioner Paul Tagliabue won the votes of recalcitrant low-end owners by expanding the league's supplemental revenue-sharing program. Bottom line: The league's richer clubs would transfer $900 million to the league's poorer clubs over the six-year life of the deal. That would help subsidize the players' bigger cut of league revenues, which has caused the salary cap to jump from $85.5 million to $102 million in 2006 alone.

Translating that general concept into financial reality, though, has been a slow, prickly process. When the league issued a memo on the particulars of the supplemental revenue-sharing program, some owners howled that it wasn't what they had agreed to. The memo had to be re-drafted.

The league also created a Qualifiers Committee to set standards for teams to pass muster for the program. Big-revenue owners such as the Washington Redskins' Dan Snyder have declared they won't subsidize teams whose financial problems they deem to be due to poor business practices rather than market size. The eight-member committee has representatives across the revenue spectrum, including the Buffalo Bills and the Houston Texans, but it has rarely met.

That's partly because the committee has been awaiting reports from McKinsey & Co., the big consulting firm hired by the league to gather and analyze data on teams' markets and finances. McKinsey just delivered its club-by-club analysis in November. Owners and executives still are digesting  and, in some cases, disputing -- the data.

Small-revenue owners such as the Bills' Ralph Wilson (who voted against the labor deal to begin with) are loaded for bear as they enter the Dallas meeting this week. The have-nots don't know what, if anything, they'll get in supplemental revenue-sharing, yet they're being asked to approve a loan to the "haves" that would raise the salary cap.

"It's a very challenging issue, particularly because of the supplemental revenue-sharing subtext," says Marc Ganis, a consultant to a number of NFL teams on stadium matters, though not this one. If the New York teams prevail, Ganis believes, it might be the legacy of the late Wellington Mara that carries the day, rather than the figures the Jets and Giants offer up. Every NFL owner knows the Wellington Mara long sacrificed the Giants' financial advantages for the good of the league.

"Wellington was one of the great men of the NFL, and that's a factor," Ganis says.

John Helyar is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. He previously covered the business of sports for The Wall Street Journal and Fortune magazine and is the author of "Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball."