NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 13: UFC Fighter Ryan LaFlare visits Manhattan prior to a bill signing to legalize Mixed Martial Arts fighting in the state on April 13, 2016 in New York City. The Bill Signing will take place on April 14, 2016 at Madison Square Garden. (Photo by Mike Stobe/Getty Images)

Bryan Altman

After years of legal battles, mixed martial arts (MMA) is finally legal in New York, and if recent reports are true, the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) isn’t wasting any time in putting together some big events in one of the world’s biggest cities.

New York, which was the lone state that still banned MMA among the 50 contiguous states, voted to lift the ban on the sport on March 22 after the New York State Assembly voted 113-25 to overturn the 1997 ruling banning MMA in the state.

Since then, a date of Nov. 12 has been set for a UFC event to be held at Madison Square Garden, but the UFC’s CEO Lorenzo Fertitta told Newsday that they might have their sights set on a larger venue come 2017.

“There’s a bunch of other venues we want to go to,” Fertitta told Newsday’s Ryan Gerbosi. “We want to go to Barclays, we’ve had discussions with Yankee Stadium to do something next summer there.”

A Yankees spokesman told Newsday that they haven’t met with any officials associated with UFC and haven’t discussed a specific date but that they are “planning to meet with the promotion in the future.”

If the UFC and the Yankees can come to an agreement, it could potentially be a record-setting event for MMA. The UFC’s current attendance record is 56,214 people, but Yankee Stadium holds 54,251 and could even expand upon that number by selling seats on the field for the big event, easily breaking the MMA’s current record turnout for a single event.

Bryan Altman is, for some reason, an unabashed fan of the Rangers, Jets and Mets. If he absolutely had to pick a basketball team it would be the Knicks, but he’d gladly trade them for just one championship for any of his other three teams.

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