Berlanga vs. Sheeraz: Louis Armstrong Stadium’s Outdoor Setting Contrasts Starkly with Times Square’s Elitism, But Will the Fights Resonate?

The venue for the July 12th Edgar Berlanga vs. Hamzah Sheeraz event will be the 14,053-seat National Tennis Center at the Louis Armstrong Stadium in Queens, New York. It’s a venue that works for that sport, but not for boxing.  Unfortunately, the stadium has many ground-level seats, making them useless for watching boxing.

Fans are more concerned about the PPV price of the event rather than the location. If Turki wants to please fans, he should price the event at a discount because Berlanga is in the main event.

It’s unclear why Turki Alalshikh chose this location for the July 12th event. It’s a smaller venue than Madison Square Garden or the Barclays Center. The one obvious benefit of the Louis Armstrong Stadium is that it’ll be an outside venue, like the previous Turki event on May 2nd at Times Square. The roof is retractable in case of freak rain, sometimes in New York. It’s one of the green states.

The Fights

Edgar Berlanga vs. Hamzah Sheeraz – main event
Shakur Stevenson vs. William Zepeda – co-feature
Alberto Puello vs. Subriel Matias
David Morrell vs. Imam Khataev

Regular fans will be happy that they get to attend the fight rather than be excluded, like we saw with the Times Square event. The crowd for that event was a few hundred carefully selected VIPs, many of them wealthy millionaires. The fights were terrible and an example of what happens with bad match-making.

Berlanga’s Local Pull?

It’s questionable whether the venue will sell out, because none of the fights resonate with the New York crowd. Although Berlanga is from Brooklyn, he’s not a big enough name to bring in a crowd of 14,000. Shakur is from Newark, New Jersey, and he’s not hugely popular either in that state. Turki can obviously afford for the event to be half-filled, but it might have been better to stage this card at the 5,600-seat Theater at Madison Square Garden in New York. That way, it would be guaranteed a sellout.

Berlanga hasn’t done enough in his career for him to be counted on to bring in a big audience. It would have been a better idea for Turki to find a popular fighter who could headline the event. Shakur would still be a good co-feature, and Berlanga would be perfect for the third fight from the top.