Roberto Soldić’s second UFC fight is lined up, and this time there’s a number next to his opponent’s name. MMA Fighting confirmed Monday that the Croatian welterweight is set to meet Daniel Rodriguez at UFC Dallas on Jan. 16, the promotion’s first event of 2027. The Starch had the matchup first.
Rodriguez sits at No. 14 in the UFC welterweight rankings, which makes this the shortest available route for Soldić into the top 15. Beat a ranked guy, take his spot. The math there is about as simple as this sport ever gets.
Soldić (18-2, 1 NC) is 31 and arrived in the UFC this year after holding the KSW welterweight and middleweight titles, then spending several years in ONE Championship. His Octagon debut came last month at UFC 332, where he took a unanimous decision from Khaos Williams. That’s a clean first step. A decision over Williams tells you a fair amount about his composure over 15 minutes, though it tells you less about how he handles a guy who has been grinding through the division since 2020.
Rodriguez (20-6) has been a fixture at 170 pounds in the UFC for that whole stretch, and his 2026 has been strange even by fight-business standards. He spent a large part of the year in a Tijuana prison and was released in April. Four months later he was back in the cage at UFC Serbia, where Uros Medic knocked him out in 30 seconds. That loss snapped a three-fight winning streak and left him hanging on to the last rungs of the ladder.
So Rodriguez walks into Dallas off a stoppage that barely gave him time to break a sweat, after a year in which his preparation was, to put it gently, interrupted for months. He holds the ranking for now. Soldić is the one coming to take it.
My quick take: I’ll be watching where this line opens and, more to the point, where it closes. I expect the public to lean hard on Soldić because he’s the import with two belts on his résumé and a fresh win, while Rodriguez is the guy who got flattened in half a minute after a stretch behind bars. That’s a storyline, and I don’t bet storylines. Rodriguez has years of UFC welterweight reps and a three-fight win streak that ended this August, and one 30-second knockout is a lousy sample size for judging anybody. If Soldić gets priced like he’s already a top-15 fixture, I’m passing. If Rodriguez drifts out to a fat underdog number, he’s the live dog I’ll be circling on the Jan. 16 card.
