Orlando City
Intelligence Report: Orlando City at New England Revolution

No fancy intro from me this week. I just have one thing to say: Orlando City plays at New England Revolution tomorrow night and I really want the Lions to win this one. Told you it wasn’t fancy.
Our friend Jake Catanese from The Bent Musket is back again to give us the skinny on New England. I also answered his questions, which you can catch over at their place on game day.
You can be as vague or specific about this question as you like, but what’s the deal with the 2017 New England Revolution?
Jake Catanese: Pretty much the same thing that has been wrong with the Revs for the past few years. They can’t score and they’re still fixing holes on the back line.
Now, as always, the Revolution don’t have any issues creating chances. In fact, they’re really good at that. But they can’t score consistently. They have a lot of players who can score with several players (Kei Kamara, Lee Nguyen, Juan Agudelo — eight goals each) closing in on double-digit goals for the season. Teal Bunbury was on fire there for a while and now has five goals on the year, most of them coming in the last month or so.
Despite these individual successes, a lot of these goals came in big blowouts and the offense as a whole has been inconsistent. Diego Fagundez might be having his most complete season as a pro despite the meager four goals and seven assists on the year. Kelyn Rowe has seven assists and a USMNT debut but zero goals in MLS this year and is pretty much done for the year with injury. It’s not that the offense is bad or without talent, it just lacks consistency.
Defensively, New England has finally gotten around to replacing center back AJ Soares, who left in 2014. Slovenian international Antonio Delamea has been solid all year but the back line around him has been mostly unsettled. Andrew Farrell is still the established right back and is solid defensively while making a few improvements on the offensive end with his crossing, but largely has plateaued in his development. Center back Benjamin Angoua is on loan from France and has had a lot of curious individual errors as well as failing to control his emotions on more than one occasion. Summer addition Claude Dielna has looked the part in his first two games but now the Revs seem to be short a left back.
Veteran Chris Tierney has been dropped as a starter and now the Revs are rotating in just about everyone to fill the spot. Farrell has moved over to the left side, Angoua has played out wide, London Woodberry has seen some action, but it’s still an unsettled unit that far too often is giving Cody Cropper problems to solve in goal. And while Cropper is pretty good, he can’t bail out the Revs every time.
So what’s the deal with the Revs? Pretty much the same thing that’s been going on the past few years, and if 2017 is more or less over, than the team should be taking steps to prepare for 2018
It seems like there’s a lot of quality in the New England squad when you look at the international and international-adjacent players on the team. What is the biggest reason the Revs have fallen off so much from their MLS Cup final season?
JC: I was browsing the Analytics Evolved website earlier in the week, expected goals are a fascinating thing and I highly recommend reading and browsing articles about “xG.”
Remember how I said the Revs don’t have a problem creating chances, just finishing them? Well, expected goals more or less proves what my eyes are seeing. The Revs should be scoring more goals based on the chances they’re creating and for some reason they aren’t. Andre Blake and Bill Hamid save everything against New England, but the Revs don’t play Philly and DCU every week, so there isn’t really anything specific to point to. The Revs just simply don’t score goals and lose a lot of close games to have a season goal differential of just -2 for a nearly last place team.
The longer answer, the Revs are just far too complacent with their roster. There hasn’t been a lot of turnover from the core team that made the 2014 MLS Cup final. Now, in theory, that’s not a bad thing because that’s a pretty damn good core of players. Yes, there are new center backs, yes Juan Agudelo returned from Europe and wasn’t on that 2014 team and yes the team acquired Kei Kamara and dealt Jermaine Jones. But a lot of the roster holes that existed in previous seasons are still being addressed years down the road. Center back has been a problem and while there are options there now it’s too late to save this season and left back is an issue that was not addressed in the summer window. Xavier Kouassi and Gershon Koffie are a solid platoon at holding midfield, but Kouassi is a DP who’s been oft injured with New England and the Revs had to get Koffie back on loan from Sweden after letting him walk in the off-season.
Related to these roster issues is the lack of development. Homegrown midfielder Zach Herivaux has zero MLS minutes this year and only a handful of appearances on loan in USL. First-round draft pick Brian Wright has a couple of substitute appearances and has been on loan in the USL. Backup left back Donnie Smith also has zero MLS appearances and a handful of USL loan games in Charlotte, but these minutes and appearances in the USOC are too scattered for the Revs to build the back end of their roster.
The Revolution should be a playoff team this season, and probably last season too. The talent is there. But something is wrong and not enough on or off the field gets addressed quickly enough to solve the problems and get the team back on a winning track.
How are teams attacking the Revolution successfully in 2017? (Seriously, we are offensively challenged so we need to know this. Please give us pointers.)
JC: There’s no real secret here, the Revs aren’t really susceptible to any specific kind of attacking play but constant pressure and/or patient buildup seems to work fine. The Revs are a pretty solid team overall. Their defensive issues seem to be more individual errors or team mentality than any specific tactic.
Fail to clear a ball from the box? Someone on your team is going to be in the perfect spot to take a shot and it’s going to score past Cody Cropper in goal. Revs sitting back to protect a lead? That’s exactly where you want the Revs’ defense, because they should be trying to attack and counter on you but they never do. This of course assumes the Revs even have a lead, which is something that doesn’t happen all that often and especially on the road.
The Revs have been a good home team, but they look lost offensively without Kelyn Rowe and Lee Nguyen in the middle. Will a home crowd and a week to get healthy be enough for the Revs? Maybe for this game, but it’s hard to see this team making a run to the playoffs.
Any injuries/suspensions/international duty we should know about? Projected starting XI? Score prediction?
JC: International duty: Antonio Delamea (Slovenia), Je-Vaughn Watson (Jamaica).
Injuries — Out: Kelyn Rowe; Questionable: Diego Fagundez, Lee Nguyen, Krisztián Németh.
Projected lineup 4-2-3-1: Cody Cropper; Donnie Smith, Claude Dielna, Benjamin Angoua, Andrew Farrell; Gershon Koffie, Scott Caldwell; Diego Fagundez, Juan Agudelo, Teal Bunbury; Kei Kamara.
With the injuries the Revs have been dealing with, there’s no right answer here. Donnie Smith probably won’t start at left back but I remain hopeful. If Nguyen starts you might see more of a 4-4-2 diamond look with two strikers up top. Nemeth could be available off the bench, we’ll see.
As always, there is only one score to predict in an ORL-NE game, a 2-2 draw.
Big thanks to Jake from The Bent Musket for stopping by and helping us learn more about this weekend’s opponent.

Orlando City
Orlando City Relies on Starters More Than Any Other MLS Team
An analysis of Óscar Pareja’s early lineup choices and substitution patterns and how that compares to the 2024 season.

Legendary swordsman Inigo Montoya, a man who is not lefthanded, once opened a conversation by asking the Dread Pirate Roberts if, by any chance, he had six fingers on his right hand. Nobody will need to prepare to die by the end of this column, but I will ask a similar question: I don’t mean to pry, but did you by any chance happen to realize that we are already more than one-sixth of the way through the MLS regular season? Six fingers, one-sixth of the season…close enough. Let’s go.
Time flies when you are having fun, and somehow Orlando City has already played 540 minutes of MLS soccer this season. I consider 500 minutes played to be a cutoff amount when looking at player and lineup performance, and with the conclusion of the most recent game in Los Angeles, the team has now surpassed that 500-minute threshold.
In looking at the opening 540 minutes, I was surprised to see how much continuity I found in the minutes played, considering how many injuries the Lions have had to work around during these first six games. In just the first six games, Orlando City has already had full games missed due to injury by César Araujo (1), David Brekalo (2), Robin Jansson (2), Duncan McGuire (3) and Nico Rodriguez (5). Brekalo and Pedro Gallese both missed a game for international duty as well. McGuire was not expected back during the first set of games, but all of those other players, with the possible exception of Rodriguez, were expected to contribute during the early part of the season.
These absences led to games where the substitutes list was full of players who will play big minutes for Orlando City B this year, but not players who Óscar Pareja was likely to turn to off the bench unless the game was out of hand or he was absolutely desperate. According to Opta’s tracking through the opening six games, Orlando City ranks last in MLS in the average minutes played by its substitutes, as the average amount of time per appearance for the players off the bench for the Lions is only 12 minutes. For context, 16 teams have an average amount of time per substitute appearance of 20 minutes or greater, and Inter Miami and Toronto are tied with a league-leading 27 minutes per substitute appearance.
The interesting thing about those two teams, Miami and Toronto, is that Miami leads the league in points per match with 2.6 and Toronto is second from the bottom with a scant 0.33 points per match. I think a lot of this data will even out over time, as right now there are several teams, including Miami, that are playing in multiple competitions and trying to keep players fresh for all of their matches.
When it comes to Orlando City, however, that is not the case, and thus far there has just been the standard one game per week on six consecutive Saturdays. The players are rested for each game. The issue has just been that Pareja has not had the depth and variety of players he thought he would have to bring off the bench to protect a lead or chase a deficit.
We often joke in articles or on The Mane Land PawedCast about how “Óscar gonna Óscar,” and once he finds a lineup he likes, he sticks with it. Even with all the injuries he has somehow managed to do this again this season, as you can see from the chart below. I started tracking lineup data last season, and even though the 2025 season is only six games old and there have been so many absences from key players this season, it was striking to see that the 11-man lineup that has played the most minutes together this season already outranks all but two lineups from the entire 2024 MLS season (including the five playoff games!):

Now, it is a little unfair to the one 2025 lineup on the above chart that it has such a negative goal differential per 90 minutes, because if it is only the 10 field players, with goalkeeper excluded, then that lineup has played 215 minutes together and has a +0.84 goal differential per 90 minutes. That group is +4 with Javier Otero in net in 74 minutes together, and removing the goalkeepers from the calculation turns that negative goal differential into a positive.
What that also tells us, however, is that when it comes to the 10 field players, Pareja has played the same unit in the field for 40% (215/540) of the team’s minutes already. Granted it is early in the season, but after six MLS games last season, the lineup that had played together the most had played a grand total of 74 minutes together (14% of all minutes). The top five most used lineups in last season’s opening six MLS games combined to play 302 minutes, or 56% of all minutes, and in 2025 it is 402 minutes, or 80%. My math, and everyone else’s math, says that is a much higher percentage and indicates that the team is focused on continuity early.
That continuity thus far this season has paid dividends, with the Lions earning 10 points from the first six games, twice as nice as last season’s five points after the first six games. Last year, the team was balancing midweek Concacaf Champions Cup games in addition to injuries and an international break during the opening weeks of the MLS season, so there were some good reasons for the lineup rotation and the slow start. This year’s squad will have to navigate two upcoming cup tournaments in the coming months, and so we likely will see a lot of new lineup configurations or more rotation once the U.S. Open Cup starts in May and then again when Leagues Cup starts in July.
Thus far though, Pareja has been able to stick with his starters deep into matches, and has only given playing time to 20 players, which is tied for third fewest across all of MLS. Fan bases often clamor for the coach to “play the kids,” but while Pareja has had young and inexperienced players on the senior roster for every game, he really has only given significant minutes to Alex Freeman from the group of players that could be referred to as “the kids.” Gustavo Caraballo has played nine minutes, which is incredible for a 16-year-old (15-year-old Cavan Sullivan of Philadelphia is the only player younger than Caraballo to have played this season, and he has also played only nine minutes), and new signing Nico Rodriguez (20 years old) has played 11 minutes, but the next three youngest players to play are all at least 22 and were with the senior club last season (Otero and Ramiro Enrique) or came to the club after four seasons of college soccer (23-year-old, but nearly 24-year-old, Joran Gerbet).
The team’s record thus far shows that Pareja has been right to limit the minutes to the small group of players he trusts, and with one game per week for the next six weeks it will be interesting to see if the early trend of starters playing long minutes and only a few players getting all the minutes off the bench continues. The next match is on the road against Philadelphia, which so rudely came into Orlando and defeated the Lions 4-2 in the season opener, and my expectation is that while we likely will not see any players make their season debut in this game, I do think we will see a different starting lineup than the season opener and probably a different one than the game last weekend against the Galaxy.
No matter who the Lions go with, I am sure they will want to avenge the season-opening loss and bring three points back home to Orlando.
As we wish.
Vamos Orlando!
Orlando City
Orlando City at Philadelphia Union: Three Keys to Victory
What do the Lions need to do to earn all three points on the road against Philly?

Orlando City is on the road yet again, this time heading to Pennsylvania to take on the Philadelphia Union at Subaru Park Saturday night. The Lions will look to get a second road win in a row after the smash-and-grab victory against the LA Galaxy. Things don’t get any easier with the Union sitting in second place in the Eastern Conference, but a win would catapult Orlando City above Philadelphia in the standings. Here’s what Orlando City needs to do to earn all three points against the Philadelphia Union.
Tie up Tai
Tai Baribo leads the way-too-early-to-call Golden Boot race with six goals in five matches. The Union striker has taken 13 shots, putting eight on target and the aforementioned six in the back of the net. He scored a brace in the season opener against Orlando to bag a third of those goals. It’s a pretty easy call to say stopping the league leader in goals is an important part of shutting down the Philadelphia attack.
It will be up to Cesar Araujo and whichever center back pairing we get to shut Baribo down. Of course, he’s not the only one the Lions need to worry about since the Union also have striker Mikael Uhre, and midfielders Daniel Gazdag and Jovan Lukic providing goals and assists. The point is that Philadelphia is second only to the Lions in offensive production with 13 goals compared to Orlando City’s 15 goals.
Formation Change
In the last match against the LA Galaxy, the Lions struggled to get things going with Luis Muriel up top, Ojeda at the No. 10 spot and Ivan Angulo on the left. Once Duncan McGuire came on, Muriel shifted back, Ojeda went wide, and Angulo subbed off. That really opened up the attack and allowed the Lions to get the two goals needed to secure the victory.
Perhaps Oscar Pareja could start things off like that against Philadelphia. Angulo hasn’t been great the last few matches, and perhaps some time on the bench will get his head straight. McGuire is still early in his return from injury, but Ramiro Enrique can start up top with Big Dunc coming in later as he has the last few matches. I think making this change could help Orlando City get an early goal on the road.
Vengeance is Thine
When the two teams met on opening day, the Union dropped four goals on Orlando City in Inter&Co Stadium. You would think it a completely dominating performance, but the Lions actually had more shots, more shots on target, and more possession than the Union. Philadelphia simply put each of its four shots on target past Pedro Gallese. That type of luck is unlikely to happen again.
Since that time, the Orlando City defense has stiffened — at least a little bit — and the team has been more difficult to break down. I’m not saying the defense is as stalwart as last season, but it has improved. Orlando City needs to use that four-goal drubbing at the hands of the Union to galvanize the defense to enact revenge with a multi-goal victory of its own.
That is what I will be looking for Saturday night. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Vamos Orlando!
Lion Links
Lion Links: 4/3/25
Martin Ojeda in the MLS MVP mix early, Orlando Pride players won’t play for Zambia this window, Tierna Davidson out for the NWSL season, and more.

How’s it going, Mane Landers? I hope this week has been going well for you as we gear up for a busy Saturday filled to the brim with soccer to enjoy. Despite my blender’s protests, I’ve finally figured out how to make frozen coconut mojitos and plan on having those get me through the rest of the week. Before we dive into today’s links, let’s all wish a happy 28th birthday to Orlando City legend Rodrigo Schlegel!
Martin Ojeda’s MVP Credentials
Orlando City’s Martin Ojeda placed second in Sacha Kljestan’s MLS MVP power rankings this week. With four goals and three assists so far this season, Ojeda leads the league in goal contributions and is a major reason why the Lions have scored a league-high 15 goals. It’s great to see the 26-year-old take the reins of the offense after Facundo Torres’ departure. Inter Miami’s Luis Suarez tops Kljestan’s rankings, despite only having a goal in five games this season. Tai Baribo, Evander, and Lionel Messi round out the top five in what could be an interesting MVP race this year.
Pride Players Won’t Join Zambia For International Duty
Zambia will be without four NWSL players when it takes part in the Yongchuan International Tournament in China this month. Along with Bay FC forward Rachael Kundananji, Orlando Pride trio Barbra Banda, Grace Chanda, and Prisca Chilufya were withdrawn from international duty, with the Football Association of Zambia stating it was due to additional travel measures by the current U.S. administration. FAZ General Secretary Reuben Kamanga expects the quartet to be available for future matches and both Banda and Kundananji played in friendlies in Zambia in February. Restrictions like this may limit the appeal of the NWSL to foreign players in the future.
Fan Banned For Hateful Language Towards Banda
NJ/NY Gotham FC announced that the fan who directed hateful language towards Banda has been banned following an investigation that included interviewing witnesses and reviewing security footage. The incident took place at the Pride’s match against Gotham on March 23 at Sports Illustrated Stadium. The fan was found to be in violation of the NWSL Code of Conduct and their season ticket was revoked as well. Gotham also encouraged fans to report inappropriate behavior through the team’s encrypted text message service to inform the stadium’s incident management team.
USWNT Defender Tierna Davidson Out for the NWSL Season
American center back Tierna Davidson will miss the remainder of the 2025 NWSL season after tearing the ACL in her left knee in the club’s draw against the Houston Dash. It’s tough news for her, Gotham, and the United States Women’s National Team, as she captains the NWSL club and featured heavily in the Olympics last year. Davidson sustained an ACL injury in her right knee back in 2022, which contributed to her missing out on the 2023 World Cup. Gisele Thompson replaced Davidson for the USWNT’s upcoming friendlies with Brazil, and Pride defender Emily Sams will likely receive more playing time as the team prepares for the 2027 World Cup.
Free Kicks
- Orlando City received $100,000 in General Allocation Money in exchange for former academy goalkeeper Zack Campagnolo’s Homegrown Player rights. The Lions will receive another $100,000 in GAM if conditions are met, and they retain a sell-on percentage if Campagnolo is transferred.
- San Diego FC added Milan Iloski on loan from FC Nordsjaelland in Denmark through July of this year. Iloski is a San Diego native and won the USL Golden Boot for Orange County SC in 2022.
- New England Revolution midfielder Carles Gil won MLS Goal of the Matchday for his free kick against the New York Red Bulls.
- El Farolito SC, which is named after a burrito chain and bar local to San Francisco, has reached the third round of the U.S. Open Cup for the second straight year. The National Premier Soccer League side took down Monterey Bay FC to reach this point of the tournament.
- Barcelona beat Atletico Madrid 1-0 to book its ticket to the Copa del Rey final, where it will face rival Real Madrid on April 26.
That’s all I have for you this time around. I hope you all have a terrific Thursday and rest of your week!
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