Published by
Sports Illustrated
Sports Illustrated
By Emma Baccellieri But it’s just the capstone on a year when the industry went all in on sports fans. When Crypto.com secured the naming rights in November for the arena formerly known as Staples Center, it made a very literal, straightforward statement: If you want to project an image of financial might and staying power, it’s hard to imagine anything more explicit than a $700 million commitment for physically giant signage over 20 years. But the cryptocurrency exchange was thinking about the power of metaphor here, too. The company had already poured hundreds of millions of dollars into adv…