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| My man, bringing all the good not great. |
Orlando City SC’s history follows the redemption variety of the expansion team narrative: eating shit for several seasons before finding their feet and running with the rest of the league. Ever the ambitious organization, they signed to avoid that fate on Day 1, if with a fatal flaw – e.g., bringing in (aging) Brazilian great Kaka on joining MLS in 2015 and, after he moved on, trying an updated version of the same thing luring (aging) Portuguese great Nani to Orlando in 2019. MLS broadcasters dutifully hyped both players, but Kaka never carried them to the playoffs and Nani would burn one season he could barely afford to (because, again, old) before Orlando finally built a roster equal to the work of pushing the team higher. It wasn’t for lack of trying, either: Orlando’s all-time roster (these things vary widely, but that's one of the good ones, btw) amounts to a casting call of the good, the great and the reliable from teams all over MLS, maybe even yours. Unfortunately, few of them lasted long and even fewer of them delivered the goods. Orlando’s turning point came in the Weird Year, aka, 2020, aka, the COVID season, when they not only made the “real” playoffs for the first time (quarterfinals, baby!), but also reached their first final in the MLS Is Back tournament (won by my Portland Timbers!). The near term could have been written off as Orlando enjoying homefield advantage throughout that tournament, but that argument never went far - it's not like they had fans cheering them on where other teams didn’t (no one did) – and they’ve (broadly) proved themselves a better organization season on season. Even if the Joy Points Scale doesn’t pick it up*, the Lions have qualified for the playoffs, if only as a wild-card team (and on a regrettably bloated invitation list), from 2020 forward. More significantly, Orlando has found 1) a reliable, if limited, consistency and 2) have clawed a little higher in each of the past two post-seasons. I speak to the 2024 season below, and finally start naming names, but they also pushed eventual champs (and damn good team) Columbus Crew SC to extra-time in the Eastern Conference semifinals in 2023. That’s something the, say, 2017 and 2018 teams could hardly imagine. The “Sign Famous Old Guy” model died a righteous and deserved death.
Total Joy Points: 2
How They Earned Them (& *How This Is Calculated, for Reference)
MLS Is Back Runner-Up: 2020
MLS Playoffs Semifinals: 2024
MLS Playoffs/Quarterfinals: 2020, 2023
U.S. Open Cup: 2021
Long-Term Tendencies
After several seasons of listing violently in the wrong direction on either defense (2015-2018) or offense (Orlando went with sucking on both sides of the ball in 2017 and 2018; bravo on the double-down), the Lions settled into the team that their fans have known and believed in over the past two seasons – i.e., a team doing more or less of the right things on both sides of the ball. I hope you’re sitting down for this, but any team that goes over the average on the number of goals scored and under the average on goals allowed tends to have a good season. In fewer words, the trends aren’t deep – this goes back to 2020, at most – but they are good.
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| Upgrades all 'round, even freedom to move one's elbows. |
It wasn’t their best-evar in the standings (that was 2023, just six points behind Shield-winning FC Cincinnati), but Orlando crowned 2024 with their all-time deepest run in the MLS playoffs. It took a feisty Red Bull New York team that wouldn’t lose the thread until the final to stop them, but the Red Bulls also beat them with the No. 1 road-tested means for beating Orlando since 2020 – i.e., going a goal up and making them beat you. As much as Orlando has improved, a good defensive team is a good defensive team and the Red Bulls rode that defense to an MLS Cup, even if they lost it. As I was thinking about their 2024 roster, the urge to compare them against the rosters from 2020 and 2023 kicked in and, honestly, that exercise pointed to why they’ve improved. In keeping with the received wisdom of “don’t fix what ain’t broken,” Orlando have carried forward a defensive core of Pedro Gallese in goal and, often as not, Robin Jansson and Rodrigo Schlegel in front of him. The difference has followed from how much they’ve improved on that foundation since, whether by replacing Junior Urso and Uri Rossell – good players, by my estimation – with Wilder Cartagena and Cesar Araujo, or bumping up at the No. 10 by swapping Mauricio Pereyra (then) for Facundo Torres (now). In another contrast, Orlando 2024 also got better at playing from width (if to a fault), with Ivan Angulo taking over for (maybe) Chris Mueller and Maritn Ojeda (almost certainly) Nani. To wrap up the above, everything about this team has other stayed the same or improved between 2020 and 2024…but it still hasn’t risen to good enough. Also, hold that thought.
Questions for Their 2025 Season
To start with a premise, Oscar Pareja has always been a good coach, but he’s only been a trophy-winning one once, in 2016, in Dallas, and it was the Supporters’ Shield (in the living room, with a blunderbuss and a dildo, but I digress). And that’s one question for me for Orlando’s 2025: is coaching an issue for this team, or is it just a roster that’s close to the line, but not good enough to get over it? From a distance and based on too few games, I’d argue that the Lions got what they wanted from assist-men like Ojeda, Angulo, and, as a damned-smart late-game addition, former Seattle Sounder, Nicolas Lodeiro. Torres added a little more value running at and around the defensive lines, but the bigger issue arguably follows from how much they got versus how much they needed from Duncan McGuire, Ramiro Enrique and Luis Muriel, aka, the sharpest point of Orlando’s attack. Again, and as noted above, when push came to shove and everything was on the line, all that attacking power (with “all that” in scare quotes) couldn’t score the one goal needed to stay alive, and the second goal they needed to get past the Red Bulls. And, until the defense falls apart, that looks like both Orlando’s ceiling and, until the defense gets traded away or falls apart, where I’m looking to see whether Orlando can actually contend for Cup or Shield in 2025.
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