Orlando City Needs to Defend Better to Make a Deep Playoff Run

Orlando City scored three goals Saturday night against Columbus, marking the seventh time in the last 12 games that the Lions had scored at least three goals in an MLS match. Unfortunately, the team gave up four goals in the loss, leading me to want to spend some time this week looking at the defense again to see if this game was just an aberration, playing against one of the best teams in MLS in their home stadium, or if as the team goes into its final stretch of four games against one elite team (FC Cincinnati) and three teams fighting for their playoff lives (FC Dallas, Philadelphia Union, Atlanta United) there is something still to be ironed out before Lions start their playoff run, assuming they make it.

Let’s start with just some basic numbers, and right away we will see that the performance recently has actually been an improvement from the beginning part of the season, even with four goals against in the most recent match:

This is where it might be fair to bring out the famous saying of “don’t make a mountain out of a molehill,” and point to the fact that the Lions earned shutouts in each of the three games prior to the Columbus match. I will point out that those teams the Lions shut out are ranked 23rd, 27th, and 15th overall in the MLS standings as a counter, but I do concede that one game is the smallest of small samples. So, let’s expand that one-game sample and look at how Orlando City has done against its opponents based on how they rank in MLS in terms of the full league standings (the first two rows are subsets of the third row):

This is not surprising. The teams ranked higher in the full league standings are ranked higher for a reason — specifically that they frequently score more goals than their opponents. It is not a surprise then that Orlando City gives up more goals against those good teams than against teams ranked lower in the standings and also has most of its shutouts against weaker teams as well. However, in the context of whether there is still something to be ironed out, yes, there is something, because once the playoffs start, every team will be good and Orlando City is giving up an average of two goals per game against the top half of MLS.

There is a story behind every goal that a team gives up, so while we have statistics that we can look at around the defense and the goalkeeping, it is never as clear and clean as data from baseball or cricket, for example, when every pitch/bowled ball can be looked at in isolation. That said, Orlando City has given up zero own goals this season, meaning every ball into the Lions’ net came on a shot, and fbref.com has a ton of information about all of those shots that we can look at (note: MLS Avg = the average for every other team except Orlando City; red means a number is worse than league average and green means better than league average):

I had three major takeaways from this data:

1. Either Orlando City’s defense has choked off opposition shots this season against good teams or the better teams are just more judicious with the shots they take, but there is a stark difference in shots allowed per 90 minutes for the games against higher performing teams vs. lower performing teams.
2. Teams towards the top of the standings take fewer shots when they play Orlando City but put a significantly higher percentage of their shots on target when they do get their shots off. Orlando City’s opponents in the Top 10 row above were Inter Miami (twice), Columbus (twice), LAFC, and FC Cincinnati. While those teams each are better than league average in shots on target overall (45.3%, 35.6%, 37.4%, and 37.5% respectively), when they played Orlando City, they looked like Olympic archers, putting everything on target with a 44.4% average.
3. The scariest numbers for me are the percentages of shots on target that turn into goals against good teams. Good teams clearly must have goal scorers, but more than half of the shots that go on target go in? Orlando City has some pretty talented offensive players, and they score a goal on 34% of the shots they put on target. The teams in the Top 5 row above are nearly twice as efficient as that when they play Orlando City, and that is not great, Bob. Or not great, anyone.

Going back to what I wrote earlier, it is exceedingly difficult to place the blame for any goal fairly on a per-player or per-positional-grouping basis. It’s like the butterfly effect. Every action prior has a link in the chain. Perhaps in some future article I’ll use Markov Chains to analyze the chains that lead up to goals to determine their likelihood, and I know all readers will be as enthralled as my high school students were when I taught Markov Chains in Precalculus. They were. I swear.

I think a common reaction for a lot of people when they see those percentages in red above is to think wow, Pedro Gallese must be having a rough season, since such a high percentage of shots on goal become goals. I do think that Gallese is not having an elite season, but it is completely fair to point out that he has had little to no chance on a large percentage of the goals he has given up. As our Mane Land PawedCast hosts Michael Citro and Dave Rohe often say, “¿Por que no los dos?”, as it very much can be on Pedro and on the defense for allowing point-blank shots.

Looking at the four goals from Saturday, as I did in the Five Takeaways and Sean Rollins did in the Player Grades, it is hard to blame Gallese for any of the four goals Columbus scored. Two of the goals were from absolute point-blank range with no defenders between the scorer and the goal, one took a deflection, and the other was smoked into the lower corner.

PSxG, not to be confused with PSG, which used to be everyone’s other favorite team when Messi, Neymar, and Kylian Mbappé were there, stands for post-shot e(X)pected goals and is a measure that includes the location of the shot as well as how well the ball was struck to create a percentage chance that a shot will become a goal. I like this stat, because it includes an independent evaluation of how well the player shot the ball, which makes me more confident in this metric as opposed to plain expected goals (xG), which just uses the location of the shot, no matter how well the ball was hit.

The four goals against Columbus were, in order of when they happened in the game: 0.70, 0.98, 0.61, and 0.78 for their PSxG value. You’ll remember from math class that 0.70 is the same as 70%, and so all four goals from Columbus were on shots where Gallese was at best 39% likely to have made the save on the shot. That is not to say that El Pulpo could not have made the save, as he has made saves on even more difficult shots the past, but unlike in The Hunger Games, the odds were forever not in his favor on those four shots on Saturday.

Gallese has not had a great year in terms of making those elite saves, or really saves in general. During the last three seasons (2022, 2023, and 2024 YTD) there have been 119 goalkeeper seasons of at at least 500 minutes (i.e. Gallese’s 2022, 2023, and 2024 seasons are three of the 119). His 2024 season save percentage of 64.5% ranks 96th of 119 seasons and 29th in MLS this season, and his 2024 (stay with me here) PSxG-GA90 (fancy acronym for post-shot eXpected goals minus goals allowed per 90 minutes — the more positive the number, the better the goalkeeper is doing at saving shots that were expected to be goals) is -0.08, which ranks 79th of 119 seasons and 30th in MLS this season and indicates that Gallese is actually not saving as many shots as “expected” by the analysts from Opta who track the shots.

Those stats do not flatter Gallese, but how many of those shots could he really have saved or should he have saved? There is not yet a clear stat for that yet. PSxG is probably the closest to that, but it is still pretty subjective as it is a human who evaluates how well a shot was struck and the likelihood of it going into the net. Save percentage is not subjective, but no analyst would use that measure as a definitive characterization of a goalkeeper’s worth. The eye test is by definition subjective, and goalkeepers also do a lot more than just saving shots anyway. I still believe Orlando City has a strong goalkeeper, and even if he is not performing near the top of the MLS statistical charts, I do not think by any means that Gallese is the primary reason for the struggles against the better teams.

I believe the unsatisfactory answer for whether something needs to be ironed out is “yes, but something is actually a lot of things.” Orlando City’s best win all season, in terms of beating a team ranked high in the MLS standings, is the recent win against Charlotte FC, which is 15th best in MLS. In their seven matches against teams rated 14th or better, the Lions have taken two points from a possible 21, and have been outscored 20-7. When they play good teams, the defense needs to tighten up, and the offense needs to score more than one goal per game, or else all of a sudden it is going to be the off-season. The next test against a top team will be at FC Cincinnati on Oct. 5 and then in the playoffs, though the Lions still need to earn some points to ensure that they qualify.

Providing the Lions qualify, Orlando City will have to defeat top teams to advance and compete for MLS Cup. As with any playoff system, all that really matters is that you qualify, and then how you did in the regular season does not matter, and the best team on the day advances. Orlando City has not shown thus far this season that it can beat an elite team, but it has shown that it can play well for stretches. The Lions tied the best team in the league and kept it close against the teams ranked second and third.

The old saying is that defense wins championships. Let’s hope the Lions can make some adjustments and defend against the top teams the way they have against everyone else.