What it means
Scottsdale is a city of 240,000 with no major-league team inside its limits and strong opinions about four of them. When a local says the Cardinals, they mean the Arizona Cardinals, the NFL club that has played in the Valley since 1988 and in Glendale, 30 miles west, since 2006. When they say the Coyotes, usually in the past tense, they mean the NHL team that arrived from Winnipeg in 1996, never found a permanent rink, and was deactivated in April 2024 so its roster could become the Utah Hockey Club.
The Coyotes were a cautionary tale about arenas and public money that Scottsdale watched from the sidelines. The Suns and Diamondbacks are the teams Scottsdale treats as its own; football and hockey it borrows.
Where you’ll meet it
On every bar television in Old Town from September to January, in the traffic forecasts for the 101 west, and in Kachina-logo Coyotes gear that outlived the team. The getting-around guide explains why a Glendale game is an afternoon’s expedition from here.
Where the word came from
The Cardinals brought their name with them, and it is older than the NFL. The club began as Chicago’s Morgan Athletic Club in 1898, took the name Cardinals, by team lore, for the faded maroon of its secondhand jerseys, and claims the longest continuous operation of any professional football team. It won NFL titles in 1925 and 1947, moved to St. Louis in 1960, and left for Arizona after the 1987 season. For six years it was the Phoenix Cardinals; in 1994 it became the Arizona Cardinals, claiming the whole state rather than a city it did not play in.
The team’s first home was Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, on the ASU campus, from 1988 to 2005, which put it a short drive from south Scottsdale. The first Arizona season produced one game locals still tell: on November 6, 1988, before 64,544 at Sun Devil, the Cardinals trailed the eventual champion 49ers 23-0 and won 24-23, then lost their last five after Neil Lomax’s hip gave out. In 2006 the club moved to a new domed stadium in Glendale, opened August 1 as Cardinals Stadium, renamed University of Phoenix Stadium that September and State Farm Stadium in September 2018. It has a retractable roof, a grass field that rolls outdoors on rails, and three Super Bowls on its record (2008, 2015 and 2023). The Cardinals themselves reached one, Super Bowl XLIII in February 2009, and lost to Pittsburgh.
The Coyotes got their name in a 1996 fan vote after the Winnipeg Jets’ owners sold the team to Phoenix buyers; the club began play that fall as the Phoenix Coyotes at America West Arena downtown. In December 2003 it moved to a new arena in Glendale, and on June 27, 2014 it became the Arizona Coyotes because, as the team put it, it no longer played in Phoenix. Glendale declined to renew the arena deal after the 2021-22 season, the team played two years in ASU’s 5,000-seat Mullett Arena in Tempe, and on May 16, 2023 Tempe voters rejected a $2.1 billion arena district. On April 18, 2024 the NHL approved the sale of the hockey operations to Ryan Smith of Utah and deactivated the Arizona franchise. Owner Alex Meruelo kept a five-year option to revive it with a new arena and gave the option up that July.
What it is not
The Cardinals are not a Phoenix team by address, and neither were the Coyotes for most of their run; both spent their prime years in Glendale, which is why “Phoenix” fell out of both names. And Scottsdale was never the Coyotes’ home, though their practice rink for most of their Arizona years was the Ice Den on Bell Road in north Scottsdale.
The fine print
The Coyotes’ Arizona story is a story about arenas, and Scottsdale politics cites it. Glendale built the team an arena in 2003 and spent years in bankruptcy court and lease fights keeping a tenant in it; the NHL itself owned the club from 2009 to 2013. The Tempe plan, an arena district on a former landfill by the airport, lost all three ballot questions in May 2023. Scottsdale, whose voters have a history of killing big projects at the ballot, was never a realistic bidder, and nobody at City Hall proposed to be.
The Cardinals’ numbers are steadier. State Farm Stadium holds about 63,400, expandable past 72,000 for Super Bowls and the Fiesta Bowl. The all-time record stood at 596-826-41 entering 2026, which fans quote as identity. Its only Scottsdale footprint is where its players live and where its fans drink.
Vocabulary: “the Cards” is the short form; “Big Red” is the mascot, not the team. “The Yotes” was the Coyotes fans’ word and lives on at the Ice Den. The Valley entry explains why a Scottsdale resident will claim all of these teams and a Glendale address will claim none of Scottsdale.