When the Miami Heat announced in March 2021 that the team had sold naming rights for its arena to FTX, the response from sports fans was a resounding: Who?
In the year and a half since, the Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange has become ubiquitous in the sports world. Its name was on the uniforms of Major League Baseball umpires. It had a partnership with the Mercedes-Benz Formula One team and deals with four professional sports teams and some of the world's most prominent athletes.
The collapse of all that took about a week. After FTX Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy amid reports of insolvency and misuse of customer funds, Miami-Dade County, which owns the arena the Heat play in, said it would "terminate our business relationships with FTX" and seek a new naming rights partner.
