Rolling Loud Co-Founder Tariq Cherif Explains Decision To Partner With WWE For SmackDown

WWE will embark on a unique adventure for Friday’s SmackDown as a portion of the show will air from the Rolling Loud festival in Miami. 

WWE has already announced that Bianca Belair will defend her SmackDown Women’s Title against Carmella and Big E will take on Apollo Crews at the festival. The rest of the show will air from Cleveland, OH. 

Speaking to Jessica McKinney of Complex, Rolling Loud co-founder Tariq Cherif explained why the festival decided to partner with WWE. 

“A lot of people on this team grew up fans of wrestling, and we love and respect what the WWE has built as far as their storylines and their brand and the way they’ve gotten this massive legion of diehard fans. They go to WrestleMania every year, and we’re building something similar over here. Granted, it’s different, but we have a lot of similarities, and we also have a lot of crossover fans. There’s a lot of hip-hop fans that are fans of wrestling. There’s a lot of wrestling fans who are fans of hip-hop. Hip-hop dominates all culture,” he said.

He continued by saying, “It’s the No. 1 genre of music. It drives culture across all press points, from music to fashion to athletics to tech to charities. It doesn’t matter where you are, hip-hop has a major presence. So we have a lot of crossover fans thanks to hip-hop being so massive, and thanks to wrestling being so massive. We just thought it would be cool to mesh both worlds together and bring them into our world, expose them to our fans at the festival and on our stream. And we’ll be in turn exposed to their fans that tune into Fox on Friday night to watch Smackdown. It’ll be pretty cool.”

Rolling Loud will be headlined by Travis Scott, Post Malone and A$AP Rocky.

You can view the current lineup for WWE SmackDown by clicking here. 

Fightful will have live coverage of WWE SmackDown beginning at 8 p.m. ET.