As preseason continues for Orlando City and the Orlando Pride, little is known about the progress the team is making in their preparations for the upcoming seasons. But it wasn’t always that way. The club used to be quite open about their preseason scrimmages. The social media accounts would provide lineups, substitutions, goals, and other game updates, allowing fans to follow along.

But there was more.

When the Wilf family took over ownership, they opened the doors to the club during preseason. In 2022, two games were open to season ticket members and both teams had a preseason game open to all fans and media.

The club continued providing an open preseason game for both teams in 2023, giving a chance to see the teams in action before the regular season started. However, less and less access has been provided to the outside world since then.

The 2024 season saw the open preseason games removed for both City and the Pride. The Lions had an FC Series game against Flamengo before camp began and a late game for Society XXI members. Last year, the Lions started with an FC Series game again, this time against Atletico Mineiro. They ended with a season ticket member game.

The club released very little information other than the FC Series contest. That leads us to this preseason, in which the club has been as tight-lipped as it has been since the Wilf family took charge of the club.

There has been even less information about the Pride. Since Seb Hines became the permanent head coach leading into the 2023 season, the club doesn’t even provide an official preseason schedule anymore.

While the club at one time provided updates on games and opened one to media and at least season ticket members, you’re lucky to even get a reference that the team still exists. The occasional photo is the only way fans know the team has even begun preseason.

The lack of availability during preseason is quite unique to American soccer. Other major American sports — the NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL — allow fans and media to attend their preseason games. Soccer teams from other countries also sell tickets to preseason games and local fans often travel abroad, following the team.

Also, not all MLS teams are this quiet as they prepare for the season. On Sunday, for example, the LA Galaxy live streamed a scrimmage against the Chicago Fire.

Orlando City played Nashville SC in a scrimmage Saturday afternoon. The opposition provided lineups, substitutions, goals, and other updates throughout the contest. The only thing they didn’t offer was Orlando CIty goal scorers, something likely requested by the Lions.

But what advantage does Orlando City gain from this?

It could be argued that the club is working on tactics and doesn’t want to give anything away. But it hasn’t been like that in the past, and that argument doesn’t hold water when you see teams that routinely are more open about their preseasons making deep playoff runs.

Oscar Pareja made the most significant tactical change since arriving in Orlando during the 2024 preseason. He moved attacking midfielder Dagur Dan Thorhallsson to right back and put either David Brekalo or Wilder Cartagena at left back. The team played five in the back defensively and three in the back while in the attack. It was a significant change, but the club still provided information to fans.

In today’s sports world, fans have more access than ever before. Television networks and streaming services regularly give fans a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most popular sports teams in the world. These programs aren’t the teams or leagues showing gratitude to fans. They’ve realized that giving fans this glimpse makes them feel more connected to the teams they follow and builds a buzz heading into the season. As a result, they’re more likely to watch games on television or attend games in person.

Unfortunately, Orlando fans aren’t getting that connection anymore. The excitement for the start of preseason is nearly gone, because City and Pride fans know they’ll receive little, if any, information until the season begins.

The club will argue that it provides several experiences for all fans leading up to the regular season opener — from public jersey unveilings to drinks with coaches and players. But what would help build fan excitement about the upcoming season would be the ability to see the team in action and catch glimpses of new signings. Or at least to know how they’re progressing.

Whether the club’s habits revert to how they were just a couple of years ago remains to be seen. There’s definitely an appetite as The Mane Land and other outlets regularly field requests from fans looking for any possible information. But even those that cover the club regularly are kept at a distance.

For the time being, fans will have to be content with the occasional player signing, community event, and photo from a scrimmage the club may or may not admit is happening. And they’ll continue to count down until Orlando City’s first MLS game on Feb. 21 and the Orlando Pride’s first NWSL game on March 15.

Is it just me, or has the off-season seemed even longer than usual this year? It feels like forever since any of the Orlando clubs played a match, and while we are getting social media pictures and videos from their respective preseasons, we are still weeks away from the season openers. The off-season just seems to keep going and going.

It reminds me of “Rapper’s Delight,” the 1979 song that is often cited (incorrectly, but that is a story for another time and website) as the first-ever hip hop song. It’s a 14-plus-minute audio experience that also just seems to keep going and going, and it starts off with one of the most well-known lines in contemporary pop music: “I said a hip hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip, hip hop and you don’t stop.”

The hips that Wonder Mike was rapping about are not the same ones that were in the news recently, as those are not hips but HIPs, as in High Impact Players — the NWSL’s new roster mechanism (introduced in December) that will allow teams to go beyond the salary cap to sign certain players to much higher salaries than previously.

Without belaboring over the details, a simple definition for a HIP is that the player must have met at least one classification from the list below:

• 2025 SportsPro Media Top 150 Most Marketable Athletes.
• 2025 Ballon d’Or voting (top 30 players).
• 2024 Ballon d’Or voting (top 30 players).
• 2025 Guardian Top 100 football players in the world (top 40 players).
• 2024 Guardian Top 100 football players in the world (top 40 players).
• 2025 ESPN FC Top 50 football players in the world (top 40 players).
• 2024 ESPN FC Top 50 football players in the world (top 40 players).
• 2025 minutes played for the USWNT (top 11 field players, top goalkeeper).
• 2024 minutes played for the USWNT (top 11 field players, top goalkeeper).
• 2025 NWSL MVP Finalists.
• 2024 NWSL MVP Finalists.
• 2025 End of Year NWSL Best XI First Team. 
• 2024 End of Year NWSL Best XI First Team .

As of December 2025, The Equalizer reported there are 102 players around the world who qualify, though that number is fluid because some of the 2024 lists will be replaced by new lists, once they are released. The Pride currently have two players on the roster who are HIP eligible: Barbra Banda and Marta, each of whom qualified under eight of the 13 possible qualifications, though in reality they went eight for 11 since Banda is Zambian and Marta is Brazilian, making neither eligible to play for the United States Women’s National Team (USWNT). Emily Sams was also eligible while a member of the Pride, but she is now a member of Angel City, so she is dead to me.

Just kidding, I will still root for Sams, but only when she is playing for the USWNT. Or if she comes to her senses and asks to return back to a club that actually has won something in the league.

The Washington Spirit signed Trinity Rodman to the NWSL’s first-ever deal using the HIP mechanism last week, making her the highest paid women’s soccer player in the world, earning more than $2 million annually according to reports. Unlike MLS, the NWSL does not release contract details, so we do not know how much more that is than the next-highest-paid players in the league, but we know that she just set the new bar, and deservedly so.

But is it deservedly so? Let’s take a look.

Let me start by saying that Rodman is one of my favorite athletes to watch across all sports. Not among women’s athletes, among all athletes. She plays with speed, power, skill, and joy, and even though she plays for a rival team in the NWSL, I root for her to succeed, because her style of play is one that every athlete should aspire to replicate. It certainly helps that she also plays (and when healthy, starts) for the USWNT, my second favorite soccer team behind the Pride, but even if she was playing elsewhere I am confident I would still be a fan. How could you not, when she makes plays like this and then gets her coach to join the celebration?

That combination of success on the field and likeability is what makes her one of the most marketable athletes in the NWSL as well, and marketability was included in the list of HIP criteria, so I think it is a quick and resounding yes, it is deservedly so that Rodman set the new bar.

But once a bar is set, another player will want to jump over it. Rodman has a tremendous mix of soccer skills and marketability, but NWSL general managers want to win championships more than just the hearts and minds of fans, so they are generally more interested in bringing in the best players than they are the most marketable players. Rodman is a great player and has set that bar very high, but now every GM in the league has a target they can use to try to acquire a new player by pulling a Jerry Maguire and showing them the money.

Rodman might not have many peers in the marketability space, but let’s take a look at a few players on the soccer side. Just for fun we’ll call them Player B and Player M, to see if they match up with her and might want a similar salary. Here are their stats per 90 minutes from the combined 2024 and 2025 seasons with their NWSL ranks included in parentheses:

*data from what’s still available on fbref.com (goal contributions, plus/minus), as well as FotMob (chances created (a.k.a. key passes), FotMob rating) and American Soccer Analysis (goals added).

You did not need to be a Bletchley Park-level codebreaker (deep cut for the history buffs) to figure out that Player B is Banda and Player M is Marta. Banda compares quite favorably to Rodman, exceeding her performance in nearly every category, and while Marta lags behind the other two in a few categories (reminder, she played those seasons at 37 and 38 years old and is the oldest player in the league), she surpasses both of them, and the rest of the soccer world, in the categories of heart and, you know, being the greatest of all time. That, however, probably will not translate into the Pride signing her to a HIP deal at this point in her soccer career, even though there is no player in soccer who more perfectly fits the definition of high impact than Marta.

Banda does not have Marta’s global profile or status, but at 25 years old (she will turn 26 in March) she is already a superstar, with high-level achievements already in the Summer Olympics and World Cup for Zambia, a goals-scored-per-90-minutes ranking of fourth in NWSL history (0.62 per 90), and she played a pivotal role in helping the Pride win the NWSL Shield and the NWSL Championship during the 2024 season. The injury she suffered during the 2025 season did not completely derail the Pride’s season, but the offense was not the same without her in the lineup — one of the main reasons that the Pride came up short in their quest to win back-to-back titles.

When she was acquired in 2024, Banda reportedly (again, it would be ideal for the NWSL to actually release this information instead of forcing people to use words like “reportedly”) signed a four-year deal worth up to $2.1 million over the life of the contract, but with Rodman’s deal now worth nearly that amount per year, it is certain that Banda’s agent has already been in discussions with the Pride’s front office about signing her to a brand new contract using the HIP mechanism.

Her current contract runs through the 2027 season, but in recent months the trends have pointed to more players wanting to go to Europe than stay in the NWSL. While that is not exclusively about money, the ability of European teams to offer whatever they want certainly has played a role in enticing players to make a move. With two years left on her contract the Pride are not at risk of losing Banda imminently, but there are few strikers like her in the world (she is one of only 44 women across fbref.com’s database of 16 women’s leagues who have averaged more than 0.60 goals scored per 90 minutes while playing more than 3,000 minutes in the last two seasons), and she is still in the early prime of her career.

I expect the Pride to offer Banda a HIP contract in the upcoming months, as now that Rodman’s deal has been signed, every team has a benchmark in place, and they can negotiate with the agents and players using that deal as a starting point. Banda’s statistical performance and age is similar to Rodman’s, though the Pride will likely offer her a lower amount as she does not have the same commercial profile. There are no hard and fast rules to defining “commercial profile” or “marketability,” so it is more about perception than anything, but I think the Pride will discount something off of Banda’s offer, even though a good argument can be made that Banda delivers more on the field than Rodman.

Hopefully, the Pride’s front office and Banda can come to an agreement on a new contract in the near future, and when they do, it will only be right that we all shout out HIP HIP hooray!

Vamos Pride!

On Tuesday, the Pride held their first practice of the preseason, and even though it is not November, I am giving thanks that they are finally back on the field. There are only so many stories out there during the off-season, when news comes in drips and drabs. It was great to see players back in their Pride practice uniforms and smiling together on the field, and with every passing day, the Pride’s roster will get closer and closer to being set for the 2026 season, and we will know which players will compete to replace the minutes of those who departed the club during the off-season.

At almost this exact time last year I wrote an article about how the 2025 Pride were bringing back nearly every player from their 2024 team, and while just two weeks later the Pride said “oh really, Andrew?” and transferred Adriana to Al Qadsiah in Saudi Arabia, a robust 87% of the minutes played by Pride players during the 2025 NWSL regular season were played by players from that 2024 team. That percentage would likely have been even higher if not for the injury to Barbra Banda, but 87% is still the second-highest percentage of minutes played in the subsequent season by returning players from the league champion in NWSL history, as you can see from the table below:

The 2025 Pride had a lot of continuity from that 2024 team, and while we will never know what would have happened if Banda had stayed healthy (my completely unbiased prediction: back-to-back champs, wins in every playoff game by at least 10 goals), we know that when she played, the team had a +10 goal differential in 16 (but really 15) games, and the team was +1.04 goals per 90 minutes better with her on the field than off the field. That stat is courtesy of fbref.com, a phrase I sadly may not be able to say again this season, as fbref’s data provider cut off its data access this week, and sadly one of the world’s best free databases for men’s and women’s soccer statistics is now gone. I am feeling more verklempt than Mike Myers in an SNL sketch. Let’s move on.

There is only a weak negative correlation between the percentage of minutes played by returning players in the subsequent season and a champion’s finish in the subsequent regular season. So, while a negative correlation means as the percentage of minutes played by returning players increases, a team’s regular-season finish decreases (decreasing being good, because the number is getting closer to one, which is first place), the correlation is weak. In plain language, that means just because a lot of players return, it does not imply the team will challenge for the regular-season title.

The correlation is also weak and negative for the relationship between returning player minutes and a team’s finish in the subsequent playoffs, and the numbers back up what most of us inherently think anyway, which is that while it is good to have continuity and bring back championship-winning players, it does not guarantee anything.

This leads me to the roster, as we know it, for the Pride. I wrote a piece in our most recent newsletter, which you can subscribe to by clicking here, about the positional breakdown of the players currently on the Pride’s roster. But if we step back and look at the macro view for the Pride, the following players, who played at least one minute during NWSL play in 2025, are no longer with the club: Emily Sams, Ally Watt, Carson Pickett, Morgan Gautrat, Prisca Chilufya, Simone Charley, Grace Chanda, and Bri Martinez. Those players combined to play almost exactly 25% of the NWSL regular-season minutes last season, and some quick math tells us that means the Pride currently have 75% of their minutes played in 2025 returning for 2026, as it stands today.

Kylie Nadaner’s return date is still to be determined, so that is another 6% currently unavailable (dropping the total down to 69% returning) but will probably be back during the season. The upshot of all this is the team returns approximately two-thirds of its minutes from last year from a team that, when healthy, was among the best in the league.

It is not ideal that the minutes that have to be replaced include one of the league’s best center backs in Sams, who played the full 90 minutes in every game except one, but at the same time, it is ideal that Banda is likely to play 500+ more minutes and Jacquie Ovalle will probably play 1,000+ more minutes than they did in 2025. If those two hit those benchmarks they will replace all or nearly all of the minutes played by the now-departed Watt and Charley, and while they were solid contributors, minutes played by Banda and Ovalle will be considered an upgrade.

Pickett’s departure will likely be covered by a combination of the new defenders who have signed with the Pride in recent weeks, some Kerry Abello minutes in the midfield instead of at left back, and increases in minutes for Julie Doyle, Simone Jackson, or Summer Yates, who hopefully will be fully healthy this year and return to her 2024 form. Thus far, the Pride have signed two attacking players — rookies Solai Washington and let’s-hope-she-doesn’t-wear-number-six Seven Castain — but both players primarily played forward in college, so we do not yet know if they have the ability to play out on the wing.

If they do, those two could also be in the mix to replace Pickett’s midfield minutes as well as the minutes played by Chanda, Chilufya, and some minutes at their natural position of forward. That leaves the one minute played by Martinez, which will be absorbed by the Pride’s deep list of right backs (Cori Dyke, Hailie Mace, Oihane, Nicole Payne). The midfield minutes played by Gautrat can be filled by Ally Lemos, Luana, and Viviana Villacorta, though most likely by the first two.

You surely noticed that I skipped over replacing the minutes from Sams and Nadaner (while she is out). While there are players on the roster who can do that, there is also the ever-present risk of a Rafaelle injury, as she has not been the most durable player while in Orlando. Zara Chavoshi and the recently acquired Hannah Anderson are both center backs, though last season Anderson was the third center back for a bottom-of-the-standings Chicago team and Chavoshi was the fourth center back in Orlando. Both players are young and have the potential to improve, and in Chavoshi’s case she was behind three really good center backs last season, so being fourth on the depth chart is not an indication of her talent.

Some of the Pride’s other outside back players like Abello, Dyke, Mace and potentially others could also play some center back, but it still feels like that position is unsettled at the moment and there is not enough depth, especially with Rafaelle’s injury history and an even longer schedule this year due to the two new expansion teams joining the league.

Speculation season will come to an end soon, but new Vice President of Soccer Operations and General Manager Caitlin Carducci still has weeks left to make additional signings or trades and firm up the roster (hopefully she ensures Own Goal stays for another year). As the preseason opens, it seems like the Pride have backfill options already on the roster to adequately cover every departed player except for Sams, but that $650,000 they received for her is some dry powder that Carducci surely will make use of at some point to acquire additional new talent. Perhaps Anderson, Chavoshi, or another defender will show so much in preseason that those funds can be deployed elsewhere, or maybe Carducci will go center back shopping, but either way, there will be a new center back pairing when the season opens.

The countdown is on until the season opener on March 15 at home against Seattle, and while right now most fans are focused on how many days are left until that game, you can be assured that in the front office and among the coaching staff they are having just as many conversations about how to allocate the game minutes as they are how to allocate those practice days.

Both conversations matter, but none more than how game minutes will be allocated. Pride leadership will make minute examinations of minute details, parsing minute distinctions to determine who ultimately earns major minutes.

Vamos Pride!