Staples Center in LA to become Crypto.com Arena on Christmas
Yahoo Finance’s Akiko Fujita and Jared Blikre discuss the news that Staple Center will be changed to Crypto.com Arena in a $700 million deal.
Video Transcript
JARED BLIKRE: Welcome back. Well, for today's hot takes, we got the iconic Staples Center. Guess what? Going to be no more. It's still going to be there, but in name only. The name is changing to Crypto.com Arena. Akiko, I'm kind of calling a top here. But let me just give you some of the details.
Cryptocurrency Company, they have paid $700 million for the 20-year naming rights of this deal. And Akiko, we were talking about this earlier in the morning. And this reminds me of 20 years ago, the dot com boom. And we had so many stadiums renamed. We had so many Super Bowl commercials with tech companies come about. And then it just kind of frittered away, disappeared overnight.
AKIKO FUJITA: Is it just me, Jared, or does the dot com make it seem a little old? Crypto.com-- why not just crypto? But I will say, as an LA native, a die-hard Laker fan, this does hit a little close to home. Of course, Staples Center, anybody that's visited knows it's home to the Lakers, Clippers, Kings, and Sparks. But there seems to be a lot of outrage, but I will say that it feels like you're just swapping out one corporate name for another.
And in sports, we've kind of grown accustomed to that. The stadium that you know is one thing, shifts pretty quickly in 10 years or 20 years to another name that is kind of the flavor of the day. And so, it's not necessarily surprising that crypto has now moved in. I think it's interesting that it's a Singaporean cryptocurrency exchange. $700 million over 2-- over 20 years. That is a huge, huge deal for AEG, which owns the arena.
But going back to your point, I mean, there's a lot of comparisons to what was happening during the dot com boom. You know, I looked up when Staples Center first came about because remember, this was a brand new stadium or a brand new arena. They got the naming rights back in December of '97 for $100 million. $100 million for 10 years, and now we're talking about $700 million. So I think AEG's kind of the big winner on the other side of this.
JARED BLIKRE: I want to know if AEG is going to take payments in crypto in Bitcoin or [INAUDIBLE]
AKIKO FUJITA: Of course they will.
JARED BLIKRE: Litecoin.
AKIKO FUJITA: Of course they will.
JARED BLIKRE: I think this is just another example. This is a whole side issue. It looks like we got a little bit of time here. But, you know, there's so much crypto wealth that's just being held in vaults. This is-- that's a big part of the movement behind DeFi, being able to get a yield on those crypto assets, but also being able to convert them into everyday assets. So we have people on this program. They're selling residential property in Manhattan or even a commercial property, leasing it for Bitcoin, more crypto payments.
And I think there's a lot of crypto on the side-- not a common phrase, but I'm trying to introduce that now. There's a lot of crypto on the side just being ready to put to work here. And I'm not going to call it top on crypto just because crypto.com buys the naming rights. But this is something to keep an eye on. We see two or three of these deals, it might be over, just temporarily.
AKIKO FUJITA: Well, and Jared, if anybody's been following this space, this is not entirely surprising. FTX, of course, we saw all over the baseball playoffs. The branding was everywhere. They've got the naming rights for the arena down in Miami. They've also got the naming rights over for Cal Berkeley and their stadium there.
So this seems to kind of be-- I'm just wondering if Robinhood or a Coinbase at some point looks to get naming rights as well, because it feels like there's a bit of a land grab with so many crypto companies looking to get their brand out there. You know, the question is going to be, 20-year contract here, are we going to be talking about this 20 years from now? I think the most bullish people will say yes, in fact, this is kind of-- you say it's the top. I'm not calling it, but it'll be interesting to see how things look. And by the way, the name change happens on Christmas Day, when the Lakers play--
JARED BLIKRE: Oh.
AKIKO FUJITA: --the Nets.
JARED BLIKRE: How religious.
AKIKO FUJITA: Crypto.com is where the game's going to be playing.
