Manel Kape just put an emphatic stop to Kyoji Horiguchi‘s redemption tour, and he made sure UFC brass knew about it right away. ‘StarBoy,’ who headlined UFC Vegas 119 at the Meta Apex, avenged his nearly decade-old loss to Horiguchi with a brutal flash knockout in the third round.

And rather than simply celebrate a potential flyweight title opportunity, he used his post-fight interview to take a fun swipe at CEO Dana White for derailing the promotion’s international expansion plans.

“Shoutout to Hunter, shoutout to Dana, and one more time, I spoiled their thing, you know,” Kape said in the post-fight interview. “They wanna go to Japan, but if you wanna go to Japan, you have to come with my black cat Japanese.”

The win was the payoff to a rivalry that’s been brewing ever since the 2017 RIZIN Bantamweight Grand Prix semifinals, when Kyoji Horiguchi submitted a young and inexperienced Manel Kape. But this time, ‘Starboy’ showed everyone that he wasn’t the same youngster anymore.

The first two rounds were tense, with Horiguchi throwing brutal calf kicks and quick level changes while Manel Kape remained calm and looked for openings. Then the third round turned into an all-out war.

After slipping a kick, ‘Starboy’ quickly recovered and cracked ‘The Karate Kid’ with a massive counter right hand.

The Japanese veteran was hurt, and Kape made sure that his opponent didn’t have a chance to recover, delivering a brutal uppercut that sent him crashing face-first on the canvas.

When the 32-year-old claimed he “spoiled their thing,” he wasn’t talking trash. Manel Kape may have actually messed with one of the UFC’s biggest plans. Ahead of UFC 328, Tatsuro Taira was on the verge of becoming Japan’s first UFC champion until he was stopped by Joshua Van. At the time, Dana White openly told CBS Mornings about bringing a major event back to Japan.

“If this kid wins, we could go do a fight in Japan again,” he said.

But with his plans derailed after the Japanese challenger lost the fight in the fifth round, Kyoji Horiguchi was the next big Japanese anchor the promotion wanted to use to justify a massive Tokyo return after UFC Fight Night: Saint Preux vs. Okami back in 2017, which only got a modest 502,000 viewers, which is on the lower side for UFC Fight Night cards.

By knocking out Kyoji Horiguchi, ‘Starboy’ just took away one of the UFC’s strongest local stars and, with him, a significant portion of head honcho Dana White’s marketing power in Asia.

The UFC’s Asia expansion plans are in serious threat after UFC Vegas 119

The UFC has spent years trying to increase its influence in the region. Dana White and the promotion have made significant investments, launching the ROAD TO UFC, developing local talent pipelines, and forming a long-term partnership with Galaxy Entertainment Group that guarantees Fight Night events at Galaxy Arena until 2029.

But lately, those expansion plans haven’t exactly looked bulletproof. Just a few weeks ago, at UFC Macau, several Chinese fighters suffered brutal losses, putting a dent in the UFC’s hopes of creating new homegrown stars. Now that Kyoji Horiguchi has also been knocked out in his return bout, the promotion’s Asian push suddenly looks a lot more uncertain.

Out of the seven homegrown fighters on the main card, Song Yadong became the only Chinese fighter to win that night after he submitted Deiveson Figueiredo.

The silver lining of that otherwise bleak Macau event is the fact that Japanese MMA fighter and former RIZIN champion Kai Asakura also ended up as one of the big winners of the night.

Under pressure after losing his first two Octagon outings, Asakura resurrected his UFC career by obliterating Cameron Smotherman with a spectacular first-round knockout, earning a $100,000 performance bonus while giving the UFC a Japanese fighter they can back for their upcoming plans.

At UFC Vegas 119, the UFC was most likely aiming to build an unstoppable Japanese momentum train by combining Kai Asakura’s resurgence with a vintage Kyoji Horiguchi win at the Apex. Instead, Manel Kape utterly destroyed the script.

With no formal dates set for UFC Japan, the organization still has plenty of time to reconsider its options. If Dana White actually wants to dominate the Japanese market in the near future, he might just have to swallow his pride and book the show around ‘Starboy’ instead.