There are no two ways about it, 2026 has been an extremely rough season for Orlando City. The Lions are 1-5-0 after six games, and are only spared from the indignity of being the worst team in the league by the winless Philadelphia Union. As it is, OCSC has only scored five times in those six games while giving up a staggering 23 goals. The goal differential of -18 is eight worse than the next closest team, with CF Montreal sitting on -10.

Clearly, giving up goals in general is a big issue for this team, but let’s dig slightly deeper than that. Orlando has given up three goals inside the first 10 minutes of play on three separate occasions, and the Lions went on to lose each of those games.

That statistic speaks to a team that’s been starting games poorly, and that’s certainly backed up by the eye test. In the season opener against the New York Red Bulls, it took just seven minutes for the visitors to score, and it might have been even faster if not for a good save by Maxime Crepeau in the fifth minute. Poor marking and positioning were at least partly to blame in both cases, as the Lions simply didn’t look like they were playing at the same speed as their opponents. While the loss of Wilder Cartagena to injury didn’t help matters, being behind so early in the game put Orlando on the back foot for the rest of the half. OCSC finished the first 45 with two shots and one on target, while the Red Bulls took 13, put seven on frame, and scored another goal to make it 2-0 at the break. The Lions had a much better second half but ultimately couldn’t dig themselves out of the hole they helped create.

Against Nashville SC, Crepeau’s goal was breached five minutes into the game. This time it wasn’t the defense to blame but the goalkeeper himself, as he was caught out at his near post by a Cristian Espinoza shot that had no business going in when considering the place on the field where it was taken. Espinoza’s effort was well struck and hit with power, but it was a shocking goal to concede, especially so early in the game.

In Saturday’s loss to LAFC, it took seven minutes for Orlando to go behind. The culprit this time was David Brekalo, as he made a mess of a pretty ordinary cross into the box and, rather than clearing it, his touch took the ball beyond Crepeau for an own goal. The play looked to be extremely ordinary as it was developing, yet the Lions once again found themselves in an early hole.

If we want to go even deeper then we can look at the first 10 minutes of second halves as well, where Orlando has given up four goals. One came in the 49th minute against Miami and cut Orlando’s lead in half; two came against New York City FC in the 49th and 54th minutes and made the score 4-0 and then 5-0; and one came against Nashville in the 55th minute to make it 3-0. While its troubling to give up an early goal in the first half, there’s an argument that doing so right after halftime is even worse. The team has just had 15 minutes to talk over things that needed to change from the opening period, refocus, and prepare to put any tactical changes into place. That makes it especially frustrating to come out after halftime and see all that planning and preparation have been for nothing.

In the NYCFC game you can make the argument that the team was already down 3-0 and playing with 10 men, so there isn’t much to be learned from anything that happened after Maxime Crepeau’s red card. That isn’t the case for the other two games though, as the Lions had a lead against Miami and were only two goals down against Nashville. The coaching change didn’t do anything to fix the issue either, as four of the early goals came while Oscar Pareja was in charge, and three have been scored with Martin Perelman in command.

In total, seven of the 23 goals that Orlando has conceded have been scored within the first 10 minutes of the start of a half. For whatever reason, the team seems to struggle with coming out with focus and intensity to start halves, and that’s a huge problem for a team that has work to do in order to get its season back on track. Whether something needs to change in the team’s pregame and halftime preparations or it’s simply something that needs to be worked through with brute force, the Lions can’t afford to keep getting punched in the mouth early. This team needs points, and it needs to come out of the locker room more focused and intense if it’s going to get them. Vamos Orlando.

Happy Friday! Apart from working and reading, I’ve been spending most of the week trying to bake a birthday cake for the first time, and it’s much harder than I expected. Practice makes perfect though, and my apartment has been smelling better than ever as a result. Hopefully practice is just as helpful for Orlando City this week so that the Lions can stop free falling. Fingers crossed!

Orlando City World Cup Hopefuls to Watch For

Sunday night’s match between Orlando City and the Columbus Crew is a clash between two struggling Eastern Conference teams, but it’s also a chance for many players to prove they should play at the World Cup this summer. While goalkeeper Maxime Crepeau is likely to make Canada’s roster regardless, conceding an absurd amount of goals this season isn’t helping his case to start over Dayne St. Clair, but a strong performance could help turn that around. Similar things can be said about defensive midfielder Braian Ojeda, who is in the running to make Paraguay’s roster after it qualified for its first World Cup since 2010. Croatian winger Marco Pasalic started and had an assist for his country in March but only has a goal and an assist so far this season with the Lions.

Edward Wilding Named Orlando City B Head Coach

Orlando City B announced that Edward Wilding will be the team’s new head coach, making him the youngest active head coach in MLS NEXT Pro. Wilding is an internal hire who is familiar with the club’s youth system, recently serving as the head coach of the academy’s U-18 team. He replaces Manuel Goldberg, who became an assistant coach with the senior team following Oscar Pareja’s departure. For Goldberg, it may mean he’s out of a job if Martin Perelman doesn’t get the head coach gig full time with the MLS squad. OCB is currently fifth in the Eastern Conference standings after four games and its next game will be Saturday on the road against Chattanooga FC.

Inter&Co Stadium Will Host International Friendly

England will play a pair of friendlies in Florida in preparation for the World Cup and Inter&Co Stadium is set to host the team’s match against Costa Rica on June 10. It’s nice to see some international soccer coming to Inter&Co Stadium, considering last month’s friendlies featuring Brazil, Croatia, and Colombia were held at Camping World Stadium. The match in Orlando will take place a few days after England plays New Zealand over in my neck of the woods at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa on June 6.

Analyzing Japan Ahead of USWNT Friendlies

The United States Women’s National Team will play Japan Saturday in the first of three April friendlies. It should be an exciting series, as the USWNT won the SheBelieves Cup while Japan won the AFC Asian Cup title in convincing fashion last month. Japan only conceded one goal over the course of the tournament, and Manchester City goalkeeper Ayaka Yamashita won’t make things easy for the USWNT. As for the attack, midfielders Yui Hasegawa and Manaka Matsukubo can create plenty of chances for themselves and others. It will be interesting to see who can make an impact up top between Utah Royals forward Tanaka Mina and West Ham’s Riko Ueki during these matches as well.

Free Kicks

• FC Cincinnati is reportedly in preliminary talks with Brazilian forward Neymar. Part of me wants this to happen just to know what he thinks of Cincinnati-style chili. [Managing Editor’s note: It’s fricken delicious!]

• Ollie Watkins had a brace in Aston Villa’s 3-1 win over Bologna in the first leg of its Europa League quarterfinal. Elsewhere, Freiburg beat Celta Vigo, while Porto and Nottingham Forest played to a 1-1 draw.
• FIFA announced the 52 referees who will officiate World Cup matches this summer and the list includes two women, Tori Penso and Katia Garcia. A record total of 170 match officials were selected for the tournament, which makes sense considering the expanded field.
• Enjoy this dive into the analytical side of the United States Men’s National Team’s World Cup preparations.
• Left back Andy Robertson announced that he will leave Liverpool following this season after nine years with the club.
• CAF President Patrice Motsepe stated that he welcomes an investigation into corruption in the confederation following scrutiny over the decision to award the 2025 Africa Cup of Nations title to Morocco.

That’s all I have for you this time around. I hope you all have a fantastic Friday and rest of your weekend. Go Orlando!

The calendar turned to April last week, bringing to mind the famous proverb “April showers bring May flowers.” It has been a pretty rough opening stretch of the season for Orlando City, and since our Sean Rollins covered a lot of those ghastly details in his article on Monday, I want to go the other way, channeling my inner James Taylor and showering the teams I love with love by taking a look at the individual players on all three Orlando teams who are off to excellent starts this season.

One of the three Orlando teams will be featured far less than the other two, and unless you are an April fool or only found this article because you have Google alerts set for (Sweet Baby) James Taylor references, I think you have a pretty good idea which team that will be.

I am a big fan of the metric that American Soccer Analysis created called goals added (g+), as it wraps up all of a player’s contributions into a measure of how they contributed to a team’s goal differential compared to other players who play the same position. These g+ values are not tied to a team’s actual goal differential, otherwise everyone on Orlando City would have deeply negative values, but g+ is calculated by looking at every play made and calculating whether that play contributed positively or negatively towards a team’s chance of scoring or conceding a goal.

I took the data from all three leagues (MLS, MLS NEXT Pro, and the NWSL) and filtered it down to only players who have played at least 135 minutes so far. I felt like a game and a half was a good measure, considering every team except one across all three leagues has played four to six total games. Then, with what was left, I used the positional rankings to see where Orlando players ranked among all of the players in those positional groups. As a note, American Soccer Analysis includes stoppage time minutes in their models, which I believe is actually a better measure of minutes played than what the leagues track on their own websites.

Let’s start with the league with the most qualified players, Major League Soccer. As a quick note on the positions below, these are American Soccer Analysis‘ classifications for the positions on the field. They code dozens of games across different leagues every weekend and classify players into GK (goalkeeper), FB (fullback), CB (center back), DM (defensive midfielder), CM (center midfielder, mostly used by teams that play a 4-3-3 or a flat 4-4-2), W (winger), AM (attacking midfielder), and ST (striker). The classifications are not perfect, especially for players who play multiple positions but are listed only in one or for teams who go with different formations based on the opponent, but this data reflects the positional coding as of this week.

*I am using the positions listed by American Soccer Analysis’ analysts, though they listed Tahir Reid-Brown as a center back and he should have been a fullback.

This section will be short and unsweet, because not a single Orlando City player is ranked in the top quarter of MLS players at their position through six games. The highest ranked Lions are Martín Ojeda (seventh among attacking midfielders, just missing out on the top 25%), Javier Otero (15th among goalkeepers), and Tiago (17th among strikers). I think we should move on.

MLS NEXT Pro is next, and thankfully the story here is more enjoyable.

MLS NEXT Pro has 32 teams, so there are the most players among the three leagues. However, most teams have only played four or five games, so the 135-minute threshold was met by fewer players than in MLS. Even so, it is still difficult to be among the top 10% of players at a position, and there are two Young Lions who reached that lofty rank: Harvey Sarajian as the No. 3 winger and Justin Ellis as the best attacking midfielder. Gustavo Caraballo (No. 11 winger) and Bernardo Rhein (No. 9 fullback, one spot outside the top 10%) also are in the top 25% at their respective positions.

I am interested to see who is with OCB for its game on Saturday night at Chattanooga FC. Orlando City plays on Sunday night at Columbus, so in theory, most players will be available, but depending on Orlando City’s injury situation, the senior club may need to hold players out of playing with OCB to keep them available for the game against the Crew. This may give some other OCB players the chance to show what they can do and to work their way up the depth chart and the positional rankings.

Lastly, let’s flip over to the women’s game and take a look at how the Pride’s players are doing.

The Pride match OCB with two players in the top 10% at their positions, but my guess is that few people would successfully guess both players on the first attempt. The first is easy. Barbra Banda is not only the top-ranked striker but is also the best player in the league at her respective position and at all positions, as in only five games she is already at a towering +2.94 goals added as compared to the average striker. The next highest goals added at any position is +1.09 by center back Tara Rudd of the Washington Spirit, and those are the only two NWSL players who currently are more than +1.00 goals added better than the average player at any position, with Banda adding nearly two more goals than Rudd. She has been outstanding.

The other player who is in the top 10 at her position is — and if you guessed this then you need to come join our staff and teach me your ways — center back Hannah Anderson. The former Chicago Star is likely up in that top 10 because center backs do not score a lot of goals, but she did score one, and she is among the league leaders for touches in the opposition box by center backs. She is probably not going to displace Rafaelle or Hailie Mace in the starting lineup, and thus may not play enough minutes to continue to qualify for the rankings, but Anderson has played well during her minutes this season and is one of only four Pride players who have scored a goal.

Aside from Anderson and Banda, a few other Pride players nearly cracked the top 25% at their positions but fell just shy. Oihane, Ally Lemos, and Summer Yates all were within the top third at their positions (fullback, defensive midfielder, and attacking midfielder, respectively), and Rafaelle (center back) and Jacquie Ovalle (winger) were right at the top 35% mark. Despite her two goals, (usual) defensive midfielder Haley McCutcheon did not crack the top half of attacking midfielders, but that is a loaded position in the NWSL, and Yates may be getting a boost because she has played limited minutes, so her extrapolated numbers look better than McCutcheon’s, who has played every minute thus far this season.

None of the three Orlando teams are off to blazing starts this season, with Orlando City in 14th in the Eastern Conference, OCB fifth in the Eastern Conference, and the Pride sixth in the NWSL standings. Several players are off to excellent starts though, and based on how they have earned their way to the top of their respective league’s positional rankings they will probably be in the mix to stay there all season. Other top players (Wilder Cartagena, Robin Jansson, Marta, a certain striker from France) still have yet to play any significant minutes, but all are capable of playing well enough to end up high in the positional rankings once they get on the field.

Due to an international break, the Pride have one game remaining in April, but OCB has three more games and Orlando City four (plus a U.S. Open Cup match) before the month ends. Hopefully, a little April showering of love on the leading Orlando players will lead not only to May flowers but also June flowers, July flowers, August flowers, September flowers…I think you get where I am going, and sorry James Taylor, but this time I’m not quoting you, because I am not going to Carolina in my mind.

Here at The Mane Land it is all City Beautiful — winter, spring, summer, or fall.

Vamos Orlando!