Roberto Soldić vs Khaos Williams Preview & Prediction — UFC 332

Two unconditional knockout artists meet at 170, and the easy read is to pick the bigger puncher. The harder read is to ask which man's A-game lands on the other's actual hole. Soldić has one, and it looks a lot like what Williams already does for a living.

Roberto Soldić

Soldić's path to a finish is well worn: touch with the lead hand, then step in behind a straight left down the centerline. That shot has found upright, centreline heads before, and it has stopped higher-level opposition in Khalidov, Materla and Du Plessis. Against Williams, who carries his chin upright and square rather than tucked behind an angle, it is a live weapon.

But Soldić's resume also carries two professional KO/TKO losses, both coming in round two, and the one with a known phase is instructive. Against Kadestam in 2023, he was dropped by a short counter in a pocket exchange, then settled into a high shell on the fence and never recovered the round. That is a specific failure mode: he does not reset well once a counter punisher gets him to the fence. He has also fought only once in the last three years, so there is no recent tape showing that hole has closed, and his third-round cardio is unsampled. Nothing in his film shows offensive wrestling, which matters on the other side of this matchup.

Khaos Williams

Williams is a low-output counter-striker, and his signature sequence is the exact shape of Soldić's documented loss: let the opponent commit in the pocket, counter, then finish the follow-up on the fence. It is on the Morono tape, and it is how he closed the show early against both Harris and Veretennikov. He has been busier lately too, with four fights in the same three-year stretch Soldić has fought once.

His own holes are clear and specific: wrestling and control time. Gustafsson held 574 seconds of control on him, Bonfim got 102 seconds with a D'Arce attached, and Pereira was able to land takedowns. The problem for Soldić is that nothing in his tape shows he can offensively wrestle, so he is not built to exploit the one path that has actually troubled Williams. Williams also carries a reach edge at 77 inches to Soldić's 73, and he has never been stopped by strikes in 22 professional fights, 11 of them in the UFC against strikers. Both men made weight at 170 for this card.

How the fight plays out

Strip away the records and this comes down to one question: which fighter's finishing path meets the other's documented crack? Soldić's straight left can find Williams's chin, the Pereira tape shows as much. But Williams's crack is wrestling and control time, and Soldić has shown no offensive wrestling to go get it. That means this stays standing, on Williams's terms, in the pocket exchanges where his counter lives.

Soldić's own finishing losses came from exactly that kind of exchange: get countered, get walked to the fence, get finished there. Williams has built his UFC finishes doing precisely that to lesser output, lower-aggression opponents, and Soldić, for all his power, has never had to solve a counter-puncher who follows up on the fence without ever having been dropped by strikes himself. The desk's pick is Williams.

The verdict

The desk is on Khaos Williams. Soldić's one proven crack is getting countered in the pocket and finished on the fence, and that is precisely the sequence Williams's whole UFC run is built on, not a theory about who hits harder.