The arena where the Miami Heat play their home games now has yet another new name after Miami-Dade County commissioners voted to enter into a 17-year deal to call the facility Kaseya Center.
The name change takes effect immediately. Kaseya, a Miami-based software company, will pay $117.37 million over the 17 years, with much of that going to the county. The Heat will receive $2 million annually as part of the deal.
The agreement comes about five months after the Heat and the county started the process to remove the FTX brand from what was briefly called FTX Arena, until the cryptocurrency exchange collapsed and filed for bankruptcy. One of its founders, Sam Bankman-Fried, has pleaded not guilty to charges alleging that he cheated investors out of billions of dollars before his business collapsed.
“The collapse of our previous partner caught everyone by surprise but, in conjunction with Miami-Dade County, we worked efficiently and incredibly quickly to fill our naming rights vacancy with Kaseya,” Heat business operations president Eric Woolworth said.
The arena had been using the name Miami-Dade Arena in recent months.
The Heat have a deal in tandem with Kaseya as well to make the company its official IT solutions partner. Terms of that deal were not released.
Kaseya has 48,000 customers in more than 25 countries, and approximately 4,500 employees.
The county owns the arena and negotiated what was to be a 19-year, $135 million naming rights deal with FTX, which went into effect in June 2021. The Heat — who have played in the building since Jan. 2, 2000 — were to receive $2 million annually as part of that deal as well.
Before the FTX deal, the building had been referred to as AmericanAirlines Arena since its opening in 1999. The airline giant, which has a hub in Miami, said in 2019 that it would not renew its deal past the expiration date of Jan. 1, 2020. The airline’s name remained on the building until 2021.
