Orlando City
2015 Orlando City Season in Review: Rating Aurelien Collin’s Season with the Lions

Among the first pieces put in place by Orlando City’s front office was veteran defender Aurelien Collin. The Lions picked up the three-time MLS All-Star and two-time member of the MLS Best XI on Dec. 8 from Sporting Kansas City, in exchange for allocation money and future considerations, which turned out to be defender Jalil Anibaba, who Orlando City grabbed in the MLS Expansion Draft and shipped off to KC.
Collin is the last man standing of the three players City brought in to be the spine of the team in December, after the club parted ways with Amobi Okugo in the summer transfer window and declined the option on goalkeeper Tally Hall just a few days ago.
Collin was literally the only Orlando City center back with prior MLS experience to play in 2015. Seb Hines, Sean St. Ledger, David Mateos, Tommy Redding, Conor Donovan, Tyler Turner, and Luke Boden all made appearances at center back this season for the Lions and not one of them had a minute of MLS center back experience before the campaign began.
The lone exception in the middle of the back line, Collin performed as advertised, and lived up to the words he uttered in his introductory presser back in December, when he said, "My best quality is my heart and my will to win. The best I can bring to the team is my will to win and to make sure everyone is on the same page. That's the experience I want to bring to the group."
Statistical Breakdown
The 29-year-old Frenchman played in 28 MLS games in 2015, starting 27 of them, logging 2,407 minutes. He finished behind only Kaká on the team in minutes played and tied the Brazilian for most appearances. Collin scored two goals and added an assist, with 10 total shots and three shots on target. His goals both came at home, in a 2-2 draw with New England and a 5-2 win over Columbus Crew — the latter being followed by one of the season's best goal celebrations.
Surprisingly, Collin was offside five times this season, which is once more than either Brek Shea or Kaká, as he tried to gain an advantage on set pieces. He completed 82.3% of his passes.
Despite having a reputation for rough play, Collin finished third on Orlando City in fouls, with 36 — less than half the total of team leader Cristian Higuita (73). On the other hand, he drew 30 fouls, which was tied for fifth most on the team with Cyle Larin. He was booked only twice all season and sent off once — late in the opener against New York City FC, leaving him suspended for the team’s first road game at Houston.
Defensively, he led the club in interceptions per game (3.5), tied for fourth in tackles per game (2), and finished second in average clearances (5.8) and seemed to win nearly every ball in the air that was in his vicinity.
Best Game
It’s very difficult to nail down a best game for a player who had so many good ones and only a few bad ones (ahem). Among those in contention were the home finale against New York City FC, keeping David Villa in check, and did the same in the third meeting against Montreal Impact on Didier Drogba. He might have been the best player on the field until his 65th-minute injury at D.C. United on May 13.
If not for an own-goal in stoppage time against Columbus on Aug. 1, that one might have been his best outing of the season.
In the end, I'll go with his performance in a 2-2 home draw with New England on May 8. As former Mane Land writer Kevin Mercer penned that night:
I had Collin down as my Man of the Match before the game-tying goal. Solid in back with some crucial tackles, the Frenchman kept Orlando City in the game against a very good and in-sync New England attack. Getting forward when the club was in the hunt for a goal added a unique wrinkle into the offense.
Collin showed true leadership by getting forward and taking it upon himself to tie the game (which he did, illustrated in the fantastic highlight video below), even if it did make Head Coach Adrian Heath nervous to see his veteran center back roaming so far forward during open play.
2016 Outlook
Collin is the experienced veteran presence the Lions need on the back line and I expect he'll be back to reprise that role in 2016. Unless someone else is brought in, he should anchor the middle, along with whoever wins the battle between Mateos and Hines. That said, he does come with a hefty price tag, making half a million in base salary in 2015. He and his mates on the back line will have to cut down on goals against in 2016 if he is to have a long-term future in Orlando at that price.
2015 Final Rating
The Mane Land staff gives Collin a composite rating of 7.5 for his 2015 campaign, which is one of the highest marks on the team to date and he was very close to being rounded up to an 8 out of 10. Considering how many goals the Lions allowed in 2015, this is a very high score. For the most part, Collin did his job defensively, while providing a dangerous presence on set pieces. Statistically, his 2015 numbers do not support the reputation he has among fans around the league as a dirty player, although he is a physical presence on the Lions' back line.
Orlando City
Converting More Big Chances Could Propel Orlando City’s Season Into An Epic Universe
An analysis of Orlando City’s conversion rate on big chances and an evaluation of the impact of a small improvement .

If you could all hop in the Wayback Machine with me, I would like to take you all the way back to Sunday, May 18, 2025. It was a glorious day, punctuated by a 3-0 victory over Orlando City’s southern rivals Inter Miami. The Five Takeaways article about that game was pretty awesome too, and in that article, the dashingly handsome and spellbindingly brilliant author noted that Orlando City “could, and probably should, have scored five or even six goals” against Miami.
You probably surmised that the author of that Five Takeaways article was me, and I appreciate your immediate recognition of my handsomeness and brilliance. I am also pretty confident that you believe that Orlando City should have scored more than three goals as well, and I am here to tell you that the eye test and the tracking data agree. The wonderful site fotmob.com tracks a statistic coded by analysts from Opta called “big chances,” which they define on their frequently asked questions page as:
A situation where a player should reasonably be expected to score, usually in a one on one scenario or from very close range when the ball has a clear path to goal and there is low to moderate pressure on the shooter. Penalties are always considered big chances.
The key words in their definition are “reasonably be expected,” and so, while the word ‘expected’ is in this definition, do not confuse “reasonably be expected” with “expected goals” (xG). I think of expected goals more like a geography problem, kind of like the game show Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Was that an excuse just to mention that one of my best friends was a contestant on that show in 1994 and won a trip to Orlando? A gentleman never tells.
Back to the geography problem, expected goals is really just a mapping exercise, mapping conversion percentages to locations all over a soccer field and then summing up all the shots taken from those locations in a game. By that measure, fbref.com had Orlando City with an xG of 2.9 against Miami, extremely close to the actual output of three goals. Earlier in the season, however, the xG tracking was 1.6 against Toronto…but the Lions scored four goals.
There are countless examples of the real results not matching the xG. While I value xG and just finished reading a great book called How To Win The Premier League: The Inside Story of Football (soccer)’s Data Revolution, which details the history of expected goals and how the author — the former director of research at Liverpool — helped build the first analytics department at a Premier League club using xG as a foundational measurement tool, I still think xG needs to be used alongside other measures and cannot stand alone by itself.
One of the main reasons I think it needs to be combined with other data is that xG requires a shot to be taken, and sometimes that does not happen. Consider Orlando City’s third goal against Miami, if Duncan McGuire’s cross had gone untouched then the xG on that play would have gone from 0.56 to 0.0, because without a shot attempt there is no shot location, and no map coordinates to use to find the xG for that area of the field.
This takes us back to that definition of big chances, which notably does not include a requirement for a shot to be taken. Duncan McGuire’s pass clearly created a chance to score, and that pass, combined with the perfectly timed run from Dagur Dan Thórhallsson, meant that Orlando City had a great opportunity to score from a location where anyone with eyes would think that “a player should reasonably be expected to score.” If Thórhallsson had whiffed, then the xG would have said no sir, you get 0.0 xG, even though everyone who watched that pass would have said, “Oh my, he should have scored that, what a big chance missed.”
Note: Thórhallsson did not miss, and it was glorious.
According to Opta’s tracking, Orlando City had eight big chances in the game against Miami. Which sounds closer to your memory of that match: Orlando City’s xG was 2.9 or Orlando City created eight big chances to score? I think most people probably think of the latter and remember the breakaways and the close-range opportunities and how it seemed like Orlando City had so many clear chances to score.
Looking at the 2025 season to date, the Lions are tied for the MLS lead with 50 big chances thus far, and just as against Miami, you can see that their conversion rate on those big chances has not been great:
Club | Big Chances | Big Chances Converted | Conversion Rate |
---|---|---|---|
San Jose | 50 | 20 | 40% |
Orlando City | 50 | 14 | 28% |
Chicago | 46 | 18 | 39% |
Columbus | 46 | 14 | 30% |
Nashville | 41 | 12 | 29% |
Vancouver | 40 | 21 | 53% |
LAFC | 39 | 14 | 36% |
Miami | 39 | 20 | 51% |
Minnesota | 39 | 14 | 36% |
Portland | 37 | 16 | 43% |
MLS Average* | 34 | 12.4 | 37% |
- *The MLS Average is the average of every team except Orlando City
If you were wondering, yes, 28% is among the league’s worst conversion rates on big chances. It is tied for second worst, ahead of only Austin, which must be driving its fans up the wall with a 19% conversion rate on 31 big chances. Maybe the release of Wicked at the end of 2024 put the kibosh on good things happening to those in green for a while. Vancouver, on the other hand, is out there Burning Blue like Mariah the Scientist (contemporary pop song alert), converting a league-leading 53% of its big chances.
For Orlando City, however, 28% feels right. It feels terrible, but it also feels right. How many times did it seem like it would be harder not to score than to score, but then the Lions went ahead and did not score? Luis Muriel leads the team with 12 big chances missed (second most in MLS), and while it takes an extreme amount of skill and work to get into position to miss chances, the reality is that 12 times independent analysts thought Muriel should reasonably have been expected to score and he did not.
Anytime there is a lower-than-average performance there is always a question of whether that performance is reality or if there is a regression to the mean coming. In this case, regression to the mean would actually be positive, or something more akin to ascension to the mean. If Orlando City performs at a conversion rate similar to that of the rest of the league, the Lions will score about one additional goal per every 10 big chances, or an additional five goals over their next 50 big chances generated.
Considering that the Lions generated those 50 big chances in 14 games, it is easy math to double that and put Orlando City at 100 big chances after 28 games at the current pace. That extra five goals, were it to happen and the team continued to similarly convert its “small chances,” would net the team 32 goals in the next 14 games, and take the team to 59 after 28 games, with six more games still to play in the season.
Readers of UpRoar, the weekly newsletter for The Mane Land’s Buy Me a Coffee subscribers, which you can subscribe to by clicking this link, will know that Orlando City’s offense is already on pace to break the club’s MLS goal-scoring record, which is…wait for it…59 goals, and so, if the Lions could start converting more of their big chances, then the 2025 team could not only break that record but smash it — like, epically smash it like the Super Smash Brothers.
And speaking of…what better way to celebrate today’s official opening of Epic Universe but to imagine Óscar Pareja and the coaching staff out there training their goal-scoring dragons and super Marco and Luis-gi to tame the dark world of opposition defenses with their Harry Potter-esque offensive wizardry?
That would be epic, and if you are asking me what the coaching staff should do, that is what I pick.
Orlando City
Orlando City vs. Nashville SC: Five Takeaways
Here’s what we learned from a regrettable 3-2 loss to Nashville SC in the U.S. Open Cup.

Orlando City came into the U.S. Open Cup Round of 16 match against Nashville SC riding a 12-match unbeaten streak, including a 3-0 thrashing of in-state rival Inter Miami on Sunday. The Lions’ next match against the Portland Timbers looms on Saturday. Despite the glut of matches, Orlando fielded most of the normal starters in an effort to advance. Unfortunately, the Lions fell 3-2 to the visitors to end any hopes of another Open Cup trophy. Here are my five takeaways from a disappointing midweek match.
Pasalic Power
Marco Pasalic decided he wanted to do it all himself on the first goal. As he has so often, he went up the right side before cutting in to the left and burying an absolute rocket of a shot into the back of the net to give Orlando City the early lead. It’s the type of goal we’ve come to expect from Pasalic since his arrival and it was his first U.S. Open Cup goal on his debut in the competition. Unfortunately, he’ll have to wait until at least next year for his next USOC match.
Tired Starters
One could see that the Orlando City defenders were running on tired legs. It seemed obvious in the two goals given up in the first half. The first goal bounced around in the box and then off of Rodrigo Schlegel for an own goal. On the second goal, no one stepped to Ahmed Qasem at the top of the box, allowing him to put an easy shot into the bottom right corner of the goal.
Alex Freeman was near Qasem, but had to anticipate a pass to the wing. Cesar Araujo trailed Qasem passively, and he was not in position to do anything when the Nashville attacker opted to take the space the defense gave him. On the left side, Nashville’s attackers torched David Brekalo from the start. The defense simply looked tired, including Araujo in central midfield.
Enrique’s Equalizer
Orlando City came back out after halftime looking much better on the ball. The tactical adjustments worked as the team pushed for an equalizer. Working along the right side of the attack, Freeman sent the ball to Pasalic, who smartly provided a one-touch pass to Ramiro Enrique for the finish. It was a well-worked attack and a beautiful finish.
Handball Debacle
In the 72nd minute, there was a handball in the box on Nashville’s Wyatt Meyer. Unfortunately, referee Joshua Encarnacion did not make the call. To make matters worse, he then gave Freeman a yellow card for dissent a little further down the field seconds later. There is no video review in the U.S. Open Cup, so there was no second look available to make the correct call. It was a double whammy of a situation. To then pour salt on the wound, Meyer scored Nashville’s third goal to give the visitors the lead again.
Taking it Too Seriously?
Oscar Pareja takes the U.S. Open Cup seriously. So seriously that he started most of the regulars despite the emotional and physical toll taken in the match against Inter Miami and the volume of minutes they’ve played throughout May every three days. Initially, it looked to be the right decision, but the two first-half goals by Nashville put that into question. The number of minutes played by some of the starters — who will need to play against the Portland Timbers this weekend — may turn one loss into two. That being said, I wanted Pareja to prioritize the Open Cup over the Leagues Cup, and we’ll find out in July and August if that’s the case.
Those are my takeaways from Orlando City’s 3-2 loss to Nashville in the U.S. Open Cup. It was a disappointing result on a night where Nashville didn’t bring their A-squad, but did bring its A-game.
Let us know your thoughts about the Nashville SC match in the comments below. Vamos Orlando!
Lion Links
Lion Links: 5/22/25
Orlando City ousted from U.S. Open Cup, OCB’s Justin Ellis named Player of the Matchweek, Tottenham wins Europa League, and more.

Well, that could have gone better. It’s understandable to feel a bit deflated after Wednesday night’s game, especially after so many positive Orlando City results as of late. The good news though is that we’re another day closer to a holiday weekend that should include some good times or at least rest and relaxation. Let’s dive into today’s links!
Orlando City Eliminated from U.S. Open Cup
The Lions lost 3-2 at home to Nashville SC in the U.S. Open Cup’s round of 16, ending the team’s run in the tournament. Orlando struck first in a rollercoaster of a match, and Ramiro Enrique pulled the Lions level after they fell behind, but rookie Wyatt Meyer scored the winner for the visitors. The loss snapped Orlando’s 12-game unbeaten streak across all competitions and Orlando looked like a team that played five other matches already this month. Orlando will need to shake off this loss as it prepares to host the Portland Timbers on Saturday.
Justin Ellis Named MLS NEXT Pro Player of the Matchweek
Orlando City B midfielder Justin Ellis was selected as MLS NEXT Pro Player of the Matchweek for his role in the team’s 3-0 win over Inter Miami II. Ellis, who turned 18 years old last week, assisted on both of OCB’s first two goals before scoring from the penalty spot himself. It’s been quite the year so far for Ellis, as he also scored six goals in the Generation Adidas Cup to help Orlando win the U-18 title in April. The Young Lions are back in action Friday with a road match against rival Atlanta United 2.
U.S. Open Cup Round of 16 Results
Comebacks were a theme throughout the U.S. Open Cup’s round of 16. Minnesota United took the lead, gave it up, and ultimately advanced thanks to defender Anthony Markanich scoring two late goals to beat St. Louis City 3-2 at Allianz Arena. Markanich was traded from St. Louis to Minnesota last year, adding a little salt in the wound for the visitors. D.C. United and Charlotte FC battled in a back-and-forth match that ended up with D.C. winning the penalty shootout after a 3-3 draw. The match between the New York Red Bulls and FC Dallas also went the distance, with the Red Bulls winning the shootout. The Philadelphia Union won 4-1 against the Pittsburgh Riverhounds to eliminate the last team from outside MLS. The draw for the quarterfinals will take place this morning.
Tottenham Hotspur Wins Europa League Final
Tottenham prevailed in this year’s Europa league final, winning 1-0 against Manchester United in Spain. Brennan Johnson’s goal was enough for Tottenham to end its 17-year wait for a major trophy. It was a bit of an underwhelming finish to what was a fairly exciting knockout stage, and this was United’s only loss in this year’s tournament. Tottenham has now qualified for next season’s Champions League despite currently being 17th in the English Premier League standings.
Free Kicks
- Christian Pulisic reportedly won’t play in the Concacaf Gold Cup so that he can recover from a lengthy season with AC Milan.
- Boston’s NWSL team will play its home games next year at Gillette Stadium due to delays with construction for its eventual home, White Stadium.
- NWSL Chief Marketing and Commercial Officer Julie Haddon will leave the league this summer as part of the league’s restructuring. Chief Sporting Director Tatjana Haenni will exit in October as well.
- After winning the domestic treble in his first season in charge, Barcelona manager Hansi Flick has extended his contract until 2027.
- Real Madrid midfielder Jude Bellingham will undergo shoulder surgery once the Club World Cup is over.
- London City Lionesses were fined for messaging a Southampton player through social media without Southampton’s permission back in August. London City earned promotion this past season and will be the first fully independent women’s team in the Women’s Super League.
That’s all I have for you this time around. I hope you all have a wonderful Thursday and rest of your week!
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