Orlando City
Intelligence Report: Orlando City vs. New England Revolution
Familiarize yourself with the New England Revolution, courtesy of someone who knows them best.

Another Orlando City matchday is almost upon us as the Lions look to make it seven games unbeaten and continue to climb up the Eastern Conference table. This week sees OCSC travel up north to take on the New England Revolution.
A visit to Gillette Stadium means that I spoke to Jake Catanese, one of the contributors over at The Blazing Musket. They’re another former SBNation site that’s gone independent and they’re continuing to do excellent work covering the Revs and other soccer in the New England area. As usual, Jake did an excellent job getting us up to speed on the Revolution, and I also took the time to answer some of his questions, which you can find over at their place.
Who were some of the big off-season arrivals for the Revolution, and how have those new faces looked so far?
Jake Catanese: The Revs added three main starters in the off-season, all from within MLS, trading for Latif Blessing and Dave Romney and adding Bobby Wood via the Re-Entry Draft. Romney has been tremendous for New England, who for the second year in a row have been hit hard with injuries in the back line. Andrew Farrell missed some games in the beginning of the season, Henry Kessler is out several months, and Brandon Bye missed a few games in May, so having an extra veteran presence in the back was necessary.
Blessing has been a solid partner with Matt Polster and Noel Buck in the midfield, and with the season-ending injury to Dylan Borrero has even had to operate as a wide midfielder. The surprise however is Wood, who has been a mainstay up top at striker ahead of DPs Giacomo Vrioni and Gustavo Bou (who was carrying a knock for a few weeks). The Revs already had a strong roster and have over the years been able to bolster it with solid league veterans and this off-season was no different.
Only three teams in the entire league have scored more than New England. What’s been the key to the team’s offensive success?
JC: I mean, Carles Gil has been on a heater the past few games, scoring three goals (including at least one from the spot) while totaling three assists (including a delightful, line-splitting pass to Matt Polster that drew the PK he converted against Miami). The Revs have been scoring goals in bunches this year, and while we lament the defense the past month or so that has been cobbled together due to injuries, Gil has stepped up in a major way to produce for his team when they really needed goals. But there are contributions all over the field for New England, with Noel Buck proving a capable long-range shooter, Ema Boateng filling in as a wing creator, and DeJuan Jones still being an outright menace.
Obviously Wood’s resurgence can’t be understated and I don’t want to know where this team could be with Borrero on offense right now. Wood doesn’t do anything flashy but he’s so darn consistent and always in the right areas that his runs either get him on the end of a dangerous ball or it opens up space for someone else. I don’t have the numbers on the Revs’ set piece chances, but I feel like they’ve converted on a few more set pieces then they were in the post-Adam Buksa era. Statistically, a lot of the Revs players are posting fairly high shots-on-target percentages in the 40-50% range, which feels much higher than in recent years when the Revs tended to be high volume/low percentage shooters. Whatever they’re doing, it’s working, and after surviving a brutal road stretch shorthanded to still be near the top of the East is a good thing. If this team figures out a good rotation or matchups to combine Wood/Bou/Vrioni up front, this is going to be an offense that can make a run in November.
On the other side of the coin, where are some areas that you believe the Revs can improve?
JC: Right now, it’s just the health of this team. Despite all the contributions from players deep on this roster so far this year, the bench is really thin in spots. Not having Tommy McNamara’s utility or Nacho Gil as a wide player really limits what this offense can do, despite Homegrowns Jack Panayotou and Esmir Bajraktarevic’s stellar minutes so far. Fullback depth is essentially non-existent on the MLS level with the Revs having to give Andrew Farrell his first start at right back since 2019 and Christian Makoun deputizing at left back so DeJuan Jones could cover the right side in Bye’s absence. I don’t know what kind of summer acquisitions the Revs could make that would be more beneficial than just getting the players they have out healthier. If the Revs can tighten up their issues at the back with the personnel they have — Djordje Petrovic seemingly faces a penalty every other week — I think the Revs will stay at worst right about where they are in the East.
Are there any players who will be unavailable due to injuries, suspensions, call-ups, etc? What is your projected starting lineup and score prediction?
JC: The injury list is quite ridiculous but Bou being back helps out a lot. Borrero is out for the year, McNamara and N. Gil have yet to play this year, Kessler is out until like September or so. Buck and Bye have been carrying knocks but could be back this week. Damian Rivera is with the Costa Rica U-23s, while Petrovic and Makoun are with Serbia and Venezuela, respectively, and are definitely missing this game. I think that’s everyone.
4-2-3-1: Earl Edwards Jr.; DeJuan Jones, Dave Romney, Andrew Farrell, Brandon Bye; Matt Polster, Latif Blessing; Emmanuel Boateng, Carles Gil, Noel Buck; Bobby Wood.
It wouldn’t shock me to see Bou start out wide and then give way to Buck or vice versa in this one. The bench options are going to be really thin with third-string keeper Jacob Jackson just returning from a longterm injury and getting some minutes with Revs II.
I think the Revs at home are feeling really good and have just enough to hang on in this one. I’ll go 2-1 Revs with Bou and Gil netting the goals.
Thanks to Jake for the excellent information on the Revs. Vamos Orlando!

Lion Links
Lion Links: 5/23/25
Tonight’s OCB match moved to Sunday, Alex Freeman makes USMNT roster, FanDuel Sports Network will stream Orlando Pride games, and more.

Happy Friday! A long weekend is ahead of us and there is plenty of Orlando soccer to enjoy as well. I’ll be celebrating my nephew’s first birthday this weekend, so it should be a nice next couple of days visiting family. Let’s dive right into today’s links from around the soccer world!
OCB Match Moved to Sunday in Kissimmee
As a heads up, Orlando City B is no longer playing today. OCB’s match against Atlanta United 2 was originally scheduled for tonight in Atlanta, but it was instead postponed to 7 p.m. Sunday and relocated to Osceola Heritage Park rather than Fifth Third Stadium in Georgia. Stadium availability was cited as the reason for the change, and the match will be played behind closed doors, although it will still be streamed live. The Young Lions are coming off of a 3-0 win over Inter Miami II and will face an Atlanta team that has drawn its last four games.
Alex Freeman Makes USMNT Training Camp Roster
Orlando City right back Alex Freeman was named to the United States Men’s National Team’s training camp roster ahead of friendlies next month against Turkey and Switzerland. The 20-year-old is one of five uncapped players on the roster and one of 16 MLS players. He’ll likely be behind Sergino Dest on the depth chart, but Joe Scally was not called up for this window. There are many notable players absent, opening the door for players like Freeman across multiple positions to stake their claim to participate in this summer’s Gold Cup and the World Cup next year.
FanDuel Sports Network Will Stream Select Pride Games
The Orlando Pride will have eight of its remaining games streamed on FanDuel Sports Network, including tonight’s road game against the Utah Royals. The regional network, which used to be called Bally Sports before rebranding, is available on various providers throughout Florida and there is an app for streaming as well. Personally, I find this as just another cog in a messy machine of NWSL coverage options, but I imagine this is handy for those out there who are already accustomed to using the network to watch other Floridian pro sports teams.
Winter Garden Lands USL League One Team
Another pro soccer team is coming to Central Florida, as the United Soccer League announced its intent to bring a USL League One team to the area. Central Florida Pro Soccer’s ownership group has plans for a development in Winter Garden that would include a 5,000-seat multi-purpose soccer stadium. The plans also include recreational fields, a hotel, parks, and a walking trail. The group will gather input from the community in the coming months to help determine the team’s colors, badge, and name.
Free Kicks
- Kansas City Current defender Alana Cook was placed on the season-ending injury list due to a torn ACL, MCL, and meniscus sustained in the club’s match against the Orlando Pride.
- NJ/NY Gotham FC and Tigres will square off in the Concacaf W Champions Cup final on Saturday. The winner will earn a spot in the 2026 Women’s Champions Cup and the 2028 Women’s Club World Cup.
- Luka Modric penned a farewell to Real Madrid fans as his time with the club has come to an end. I don’t know where his next stop will be, but I sure hope it’s not with a team the Lions still have to face this year.
- Raphina signed a contract extension with Barcelona that will keep him at the club until 2028. The 28-year-old recorded 34 goals and 25 assists in 56 appearances during this breakout year with Barcelona.
- Here’s a nice breakdown of what to watch for in Saturday’s Women’s Champions League final between Arsenal and Barcelona.
That’s all I have for you today. I hope you all have a fantastic Friday and rest of your holiday weekend!
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!
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