Orlando City
Orlando City vs. Nashville SC: Five Takeaways

It might not have gone quite as we hoped, but Orlando City SC’s 1-1 draw on the road with Nashville SC was hardly a bad result. It might be disappointing after Saturday’s rousing win over Atlanta, but you can’t win them all. Here are my thoughts on Orlando’s first away game against Nashville.
Right-Sided Emphasis
During the first half especially Orlando placed a huge amount of emphasis on attacking down the right-hand side of the Nashville defense. Rightfully so too; with Daryl Dike often attracting the attention of both center backs when Orlando had the ball, it meant that Daniel Lovitz had to tuck in a bit tighter to fill the resulting space. That meant that Ruan found himself in space down the right hand side time and time again, and while the Lions weren’t able to take advantage, that’s where lots of the danger came from OCSC in this one.
Urso Impressive Again
Junior Urso was one of the best players on the field in Orlando’s victory over Atlanta on Saturday, and he turned in another great performance in this game. He was extremely energetic, and was constantly quick to press Nashville players when they picked up the ball in midfield. He also consistently tried to quickly transition the team from defense to attack and generally did a lot of the sort of work that doesn’t show up on the stat sheet. He was unlucky to be denied a goal in a second straight game by an excellent Joe Willis save, and his overall play well have warranted him getting on the score sheet. Having him back has added a great dimension to Orlando City’s midfield, and when he’s in form he’s frequently one of the Lions’ better players.
Tale of Two Halves
While Orlando City didn’t necessarily dominate the first half, it was certainly the team dictating most of play. The Lions defended well for the most part, were lightning quick when transitioning to the counter attack, and did a good job of stifling Nashville’s attempts to play through the middle of the field. Benji Michel’s howitzer of a goal was the icing on the top of an effective if not always entertaining first 45 minutes. The same can’t be said for the second half. Nashville made some adjustments in the locker room which paid off almost immediately with a goal just two minutes after the restart. From that point it was a much more even affair, with Nashville looking much more dangerous than in the first half and Orlando wilting slightly until switching to a 3-5-2 in the final 20-ish minutes. While the introduction of Chris Mueller helped to invigorate the team, the Lions were on much more even footing with their opponents during the latter half of play.
No Quick Response This Time
OCSC has made a bit of a habit of finding extremely quick responses to conceding goals this year. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for last night’s draw. The streak had to run out some time, and that’s precisely what happened on the road. While that isn’t necessarily a knock against the team, it did mean that Oscar Pareja seemed to change his tactics. Papi withdrew Mauricio Pereyra, Oriol Rosell, and Benji Michel with perhaps the intent to try to preserve the point on the road and be content with four points from an available six during the team’s last two road games. That doesn’t mean the team wasn’t trying to get the three points — the shape change late produced some opportunities down the stretch. The encouraging thing is that even though Orlando wasn’t able to retake the lead, the Lions also didn’t collapse and go on to lose the game after conceding quickly in the second half, which is something fans had grown accustomed to seeing from previous OCSC teams. It’s yet another sign that this team is being instilled with the right kind of mental fortitude, and its good to see.
Final Third Product Lacking
At the end of the day, Orlando wasn’t clinical enough in front of goal. While Benji did score a rocket, he lingered too long before trying to shoot when he had an excellent opportunity to do so in the second half, and nothing came of the chance. Though it would be harsh to be too critical of Urso not scoring his headed chance when Willis made an excellent save, it was a wonderful chance that didn’t end up in the back of the net. The other issue was that for much of the night OCSC had trouble finding the right ball in the final third. The Lions didn’t have too much trouble getting the ball to within 25-30 yards of the Nashville goal but once it was there the team seemed to either run out of ideas or not quite be able to execute the necessary pass to pick the Nashville lock. Granted, the team was missing Nani and Joao Moutinho on the left, and not having Mueller to link with Ruan for a little over a half takes away some of the danger down the right hand side, but play in the final third still wasn’t quite good enough.
In the end it’s hard for me to be too disappointed about the result. It always stinks to drop points from winning positions but taking four points from two road games isn’t bad at all, especially considering how brutal traveling is with the new guidelines in place. What did you guys think of this one? As always, feel free to have your say in the comments.
Orlando City
Orlando City Showed Defensive Improvement Against D.C. United
The Lions looked much better defensively last game, but now they have to prove that they can build on that performance.

As the 2025 Major League Soccer season has gotten underway, one of the bigger topics surrounding Orlando City has been the team’s struggles on the defensive side of the ball. Andrew DeSalvo called on the team to get its defensive game up to scratch last week, and with good reason. The Lions have conceded 11 goals in five games, a mark that is good for second-worst in the league and is only eclipsed by Toronto FC’s 12. Given how Oscar Pareja’s Orlando sides have typically been built on the backs of a strong defensive foundation, its been a startling departure, particularly when paired with an offense whose output would usually be enough to get results as long as the defense isn’t leaking like a sieve.
Fortunately, OCSC had a much-improved defensive showing in Saturday’s 4-1 victory over D.C. United. Despite a consolation goal in stoppage time preventing the Lions from keeping a first clean sheet of the season, it was the team’s first time holding an opponent under two goals in 2025. A low bar to clear maybe, but that’s where we are right now.
Including the goal, D.C. took 14 shots and put five on target, with eight shots coming from inside the box. Those eight shots resulted in one goal, one attempt missed, three shots blocked, and two shots saved. The Lions managed to block nearly half of the shots taken within their own box without Javier Otero needing to be called into action. He took care of another two, and the Lions got lucky with one wayward shot before their luck ran out on the goal. All things considered, that’s not bad, and Orlando’s five blocks on the night tied for second-most this season, with the high water mark of six set against the Philadelphia Union in the opening game. Blocks aren’t a tell-all defensive statistic. For example, OCSC only had one in the 4-2 win over Toronto FC — probably due to TFC only managing nine shots on the night. Still, it’s nice to see bodies getting in the way to disrupt potentially dangerous opportunities.
D.C. ended the night with 1.60 expected goals (xG), and while that stat isn’t perfect, it’s good to see that D.C. didn’t vastly underperform the statistic, which would mean they should have scored more and simply didn’t take good chances. Of the visitors’ 1.60 xG, 45% came from Lukas McNaughton’s goal, with another 29% coming from Dominique Badji’s 68th-minute attempt that Otero saved. The next highest attempts were 17% from a Derek Dodson attempt in stoppage time, which was blocked, and 16% from a Christian Benteke header in the 54th, which was saved by Otero. Essentially, Orlando mostly did a good job in preventing D.C. from getting off dangerous attempts, and the opposition’s only big chance of the night came on McNaughton’s goal.
This also all came with Orlando City having slightly less of the ball than D.C., with 48% possession to the opponent’s 52%. The imbalance isn’t huge, but it’s a good sign that Orlando was largely able to limit dangerous chances even while spending periods of time without the ball and while being peppered with a whopping 10 corner kicks.
It wasn’t a perfect performance, as evidenced by the late goal, but frankly I’d have been surprised to see a sudden leap in defensive play given the struggles of the first four games. The D.C. win showed a lot of good things though, and gave the Lions a performance that they can build off of. Next up is an LA Galaxy team that has struggled for goals with only four in five games, but LA has attackers like Christian Ramirez and Gabriel Pec that are capable of doing plenty of damage on the offensive end. It’ll be a good test of whether the defensive unit is on the right trajectory, and hopefully it’s one that the defense can pass with flying colors. Vamos Orlando!
Lion Links
Lion Links: 3/28/25
Orlando Pride prepare for the San Diego Wave, NWSL weekend matches, USMNT roster predictions, and more.

We made it to Friday! Celebrate however you see fit, whether that’s an indulgent breakfast or just your favorite cup of coffee. This week has flown by a bit for me and I’m looking forward to a weekend filled with soccer. I’ll be spending the next few days working, reading a new book or two, and working out the kinks of making a frozen coconut mojito. My blender hates me. Let’s get to today’s links!
Orlando Pride Prepare for the San Diego Wave
The Orlando Pride will look to extend their 2025 win streak to three games — and their overall win streak to seven — on Saturday when they host the San Diego Wave at noon. Orlando has looked the part of a defending champion so far, leading the league with eight goals without conceding a single one in two games. The Pride will take on a revamped San Diego team that is unbeaten under Head Coach Jonas Eidevall. Pride Head Coach Seb Hines spoke about how Orlando will need to set the tone early on at home against the Wave and keep up the momentum.
NWSL Provides Entertaining Slate of Weekend Matches
While it’s far too early to think about the NWSL Shield race, it never hurts to check out how the Pride’s competitors are doing while enjoying some great soccer. Tonight features a pair of matches at the same time, with the Washington Spirit hosting Bay FC and the Houston Dash playing on the road against NJ/NY Gotham FC. Kansas City Current forward Temwa Chawinga will have a chance to tie her own record of scoring in eight straight games when her team plays the Utah Royals on Saturday. On Sunday, we’ll get to see if the Seattle Reign’s solid start continues against an unbeaten Angel City FC team searching for its first win of the season.
USMNT Roster Predictions for Concacaf Gold Cup
The pressure is on United States Men’s National Team Head Coach Mauricio Pochettino to turn things around after a rough showing in the final four of the Concacaf Nations League. This summer’s Concacaf Gold Cup will be an opportunity for the USMNT to impress in preparation for the 2026 World Cup, and Pro Soccer Wire dove into how the roster could look for the tournament. Injuries to Ricardo Pepi and Folarin Balogun complicate things up top, but we could see Brenden Aaronson or Alex Zendejas could return to the attack. The Gold Cup will likely also determine which goalkeeper between Matt Turner, Zack Steffen, and Patrick Schulte emerges as the true starter. Players like Sergino Dest, Malik Tillman, and Johnny Cardoso are other notable names to keep an eye out for leading into the tournament.
FA Cup Quarterfinals Kick Off This Weekend
Only eight teams remain in the FA Cup and the action returns with enticing quarterfinal matchups. Preston North End is the only team outside of the English Premier League still fighting, but Manchester City is the only traditional giant left in the field as well. City will face off against a Bournemouth side that beat it 2-1 back in November, while Preston will have to get past Aston Villa, which has only won two of its last eight games. Nottingham Forest forward Chris Wood’s injury adds an obstacle to overcome when the team travels to play Brighton and Hove Albion. Meanwhile, Crystal Palace gets star striker Jean-Philippe Mateta back from injury for its clash with Fulham.
Free Kicks
- Time is running out for Orlando City goalkeeper Pedro Gallese and Peru to qualify for the 2026 World Cup after the latest CONMEBOL matches. Peru did well to beat Bolivia, but lost a crucial match against Venezuela.
- Angel City FC signed Brazilian midfielder Maiara Niehues from Sporting CP on a three-year contract. The 20-year-old recorded 18 goals and three assists in 57 matches across all competitions with the Portuguese club.
- MLS announced an expanded partnership with the media company Footballco to increase coverage of the league and its players. Hopefully this partnership results in a spotlight being put on smaller market teams and lesser known stars in the league, but only time will tell.
- Denver’s NWSL team announced its plans for a new training center and temporary stadium that will seat 12,000 fans for 2026 and 2027.
- The English Premier League’s transfer window will temporarily open on June 1 and close on June 10 to allow clubs participating in the Club World Cup to sign players before the tournament.
- After losing 2-0 in the first leg, Chelsea beat Manchester City 3-0 to advance to the UEFA Women’s Champions League semifinals. The semifinals will have Chelsea take on Barcelona and Arsenal square off against Lyon.
- UEFA is investigating Real Madrid players Kylian Mbappe, Vinicius Junior, Antonio Rudiger, and Dani Ceballos for indecent conduct in the Champions League. If a ban is handed out, that player would miss the first leg of Madrid’s quarterfinal matchup with Arsenal.
- Barcelona beat Osasuna 3-0 to move three points ahead of Real Madrid at the top of La Liga, but forward Dani Olmo sustained a leg injury that could see him miss time.
That’s all I have for you for today’s links. I hope you all have a fantastic Friday and rest of your weekend. Go Orlando!
Orlando City
Orlando City’s Offense Looks Different With Marco Pašalić on the Right
How Orlando City’s offensive style changed from the end of 2024 to 2025 and how the Croatian contributes differently than Facundo Torres did.

As I often like to do, I will start this article on Orlando City by writing about…baseball. America’s pastime — or at least it was for most of the 20th century — is celebrating opening day for the 2025 season this week, but that is not why I mention baseball. Rather, when I think about baseball I often think about baseball movies, and that brings me to one of the seminal sports films of all time, The Sandlot.
There are many great characters and moments in this movie, but a fan favorite was Michael “Squints” Palledorous. If you have not seen The Sandlot, you should, because that movie is fun and fun is good, but the reason I brought Squints up is because…wait for it…if you squint really hard when looking at Orlando City’s newest Designated Player, Marco Pašalić, then you can see Orlando City’s former Designated Player, and all-time leading scorer, Facundo Torres.
I say you have to squint really hard because aside from being similarly aged (Torres is 154 days older than Pašalić), left-foot-dominant players who play on the right side of the field, the styles of play for both players are quite different, as is how Orlando City has played in 2025 with Pašalić vs. toward the end of 2024 with Torres.
Let’s start with Orlando’s style of play in 2025 vs. the end of 2024, and we will look at the two individual players after that. I am choosing the final games of last season, because those are the most recent games played by the team, and as was frequently discussed in the run-up to this season, Orlando City brought back many of its key players from last season and has much of the same coaching staff as well. If you look at the statistics though, the team is playing differently this season as compared to 2024.
I’ve broken this out into three sections: the first five games of the 2025 regular season, the five 2024 playoff games, and the final five 2024 regular-season games. Playoff games are played differently than regular-season games, so I did not want to just compare the most recent five games of 2024 to the first five of 2025. This data is sourced from fbref.com, tracked by coders from Opta (all data is on a per-game basis):
Category | 2025 Reg. Season (First 5 Games) | 2024 Playoffs (5 games) | 2024 Reg. Season (Last 5 Games) |
---|---|---|---|
Possession | 46% | 56% | 52% |
Passes Attempted | 473 | 538 | 536 |
Touches in Attacking Third | 142 | 195 | 183 |
Shots | 16.0 | 12.4 | 13.4 |
Expected Goals | 2.0 | 1.3 | 1.9 |
Attacks Down Right Side | 37% | 31% | 28% |
We will get back to the attacks down the right side more specifically when we look at Pašalić and Torres, but look at the major differences in all of these numbers. This year’s team, at least through the first few games, is playing a different style of soccer than the 2024 team played at the end of the season. They are possessing the ball less throughout the game but also in particular while in the attacking third of the field. This comes from rapid counterattacks and excellent transition offense as well as a more direct approach to creating shots.
We can see this more direct approach by looking at the reduction in touches per game in the attacking third of the field juxtaposed against an increase of more than 20% in shots per game, meaning that the ratio of touches per shot in the attacking third has decreased dramatically from last year to this year. During the final five regular-season games, the Lions were averaging 13.7 touches per shot, and thus far in 2025 that number is 8.9.
In this context, a touch is counted not as every individual dribble or pass but rather as a count of each person who possesses the ball in the attacking third of the field. So, a pass from player A to player B, who then takes four dribbles and passes to player C is three touches, even though player B dribbled the ball four times.
The upshot of the reduction of touches per shot is that Orlando City is getting to its shots in a reduced number of possessors of the ball, meaning that there has been lower risk of a bad exchange since there have been fewer exchanges. This year’s team is generating shots from more dangerous locations (using expected goals) as well, and the Lions’ 13 goals scored in the first five games leads the league at this point of the season.
Looking at the final row in that table, there is also a big difference in the location of where the Lions are emanating their attacks from. The team is more frequently launching attacks down the right side, and that is where the comparison of Torres and Pašalić starts to come into play. It must also be noted that the primary right back in 2024 was Dagur Dan Thórhallsson, whereas in 2025 it has been future USMNT starter Alex Freeman (I crossed it out, but I do believe that Freeman is a serious candidate to play on the national team), and it is likely not coincidental that there have been more attacks down the right side with the direct playing style of the Pašalić-Freeman combination.
Torres also always made a point to play all across the attacking zone, often switching sides with Iván Angulo, whereas that has not been the case this season with Pašalić. I pulled the heatmaps (thank you very much, whoscored.com) for Pašalić and Torres from the same five-game periods from the table above, and you can see that in Torres’s heatmaps the blue shading goes all over the field, whereas for Pašalić he stays mostly to the right side (Orlando City is attacking from left to right on all of the heatmaps below).

These heatmaps and the following stats show some stark differences between the Croatian Designated Player and the Uruguayan former Designated Player in terms of how they play/played for Orlando City (all data is on a per-game basis):
Category | Pašalić: 2025 Regular Season | Torres: Playoffs | Torres: Last 5 games of 2024 Regular Season |
---|---|---|---|
Touches | 37.8 | 61.0 | 50.8 |
Take-Ons | 4.8 | 2.8 | 1.2 |
Passes Attempted | 23.2 | 52.0 | 43.4 |
Shots | 3.0 | 2.4 | 1.6 |
Shot-Creating Actions | 3.2 | 3.8 | 2.4 |
Progressive Passes Received | 5.6 | 9.8 | 8.0 |
Across nearly every metric there are big differences between the players, but in particular the ones that stand out to me are how much of the offense flowed through Torres last season and how the Lions looked for him to initiate as compared to how Pašalić appears to get his offense in the flow of play — at least through the first five games of this season. Pašalić also attacks more off the dribble than Torres did, as shown by his much higher rate of take-ons per game, and he is able to get shots off at a higher rate as well.
That leads me to the last comparison, which is not shown in the table above, but is the most critical category for any offensive player — goals scored. Orlando City has not yet played 15% of its 2025 MLS regular-season games, but Pašalić has scored four goals and assisted on another. With so many games still to play, we can extrapolate the numbers to see a pace of 27 goals scored and seven assists, but we can also consider that defenses will adjust over a long season and it is unlikely that the pace will remain the same for the next seven months.
Torres, sadly, is not on pace to score any more goals for the Lions, but he did score 37 MLS regular-season goals during his three seasons, including two seasons of 14 goals each, and he added 20 assists as well. His numbers are real, not theoretical or extrapolated, and while it is incredibly exciting to think about Orlando City’s offense and what it could be and what Pašalić could achieve, we are still only five games into the new season, so let’s keep our excitement from boiling over for at least another week.
Pašalić still has a way to go to show that he can consistently create goals the way that Torres did, but if you squint real hard, you can see that the potential is there for him to do so or perhaps even surpass his predecessor out on the right wing. He is playing with a different offensive style but going after the same result.
We will see.
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