Orlando City’s Most Successful Offensive and Defensive Lineups

Soccer is a game that has cheer leaders but not cheerleaders, so there is usually no opportunity to hear people chanting out “two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate?” at soccer matches. In this article, however, we are going to offer some appreciation, and look back at a two, a four, a six and….an 11 that we appreciate.

Let’s start with the two, and take a look at midfield tandem of César Araújo and Wilder Cartagena. Orlando City’s preferred partnership started 23 games alongside one another in all competitions in 2024, and in those games Orlando City went 13-4-6.

Taking a quick look at the final MLS standings, the 2.00 points per game in MLS play that Orlando City averaged when Araújo and Cartagena started together in the midfield would have ranked only behind Inter Miami’s 2.18 points per game across all 29 MLS teams and was 31% better than Orlando City’s actual final tally of 1.53 points per game (15-12-7). Doing the math, if the Lions were 11-4-3 with Araújo and Cartagena starting together (including six straight wins in their most recent six starts) and 15-12-7 overall, then they must have been 4-8-4 when it was a different starting midfield two, and 4-8-4 is a paltry 1.00 points per game, something closer to a team in the bottom third of the league. Orlando City’s lineup with their top midfield partnership was equivalent to a team on a top-two pace, a one-two punch that was frequently too powerful for an opponent to handle.

Moving on from two to four, let’s take a look at Orlando City’s back lines throughout the season to see which combination of four performed the foremost (ok, I’ll stop) throughout the season. There was a period of time early in the season when the Lions deployed a three-man back line with two wingbacks for a few games, but once they got everyone back from international matches and back to health they have rolled with the four-man back line ever since.

On the season Orlando City has played 41 games (34 in MLS, four in Concacaf Champions Cup, and three in Leagues Cup), so there have been 3,690 total minutes played by defensive groupings so far. Here are the six groupings that played at least 5% of the minutes, and how they have performed this season (own goals scored by Orlando City’s opponents have been excluded, players listed left to right on how they played positionally):

Interestingly, the three-man back line of Rodrigo Schlegel, Cartagena, and David Brekalo has the best goals against per 90 minutes rating, giving up less than one goal per game, but the team struggled to score while in this lineup — odd since a three-man back line allows for seven players to play higher up the field, as opposed to only six when in the standard four-man back line. I chalk a lot of this up to it being an unfamiliar formation and one that was played early in the season when the team was trying to figure out how to mix the attacking players together, rather than an issue caused by a three-man back line.

We are focusing on the fours here though, and while the teams preferred back line clearly appears to be Rafael Santos, Robin Jansson, Schlegel, and Dagur Dan Thórhallsson, the data points to two other groupings as ones that played at least 250 minutes together and had better goal differentials. The Santos, Jansson, Schlegel, and Kyle Smith back line did not debut until September, but it was effective against Charlotte (late game), Dallas (starting four), Philadelphia (starting four), and Cincinnati (starting four), and had the second-best goals against per 90 minutes rating of the most used lineups.

The Smith, Jansson, Schlegel, and Thórhallsson back line played together in nine different games — a mix of four starts and five games where they subbed into that grouping. While it was not a grouping that was difficult to break down and score against, as evidenced by the 1.66 goals against per 90 minutes, they were +4 in only 379 minutes together, so the Lions were banging in the goals at a rate of 2.61 goals scored per 90 minutes.

Sometimes the best defense is a good offense, but when we are trying to find the best defensive group of four, we want the best defense to be the best defense, so it looks like it would be either Santos, Jansson, Schlegel, and Smith or Santos, Jansson, Brekalo, and Thórhallsson. Alas, we never saw Santos, Jansson, Brekalo, and Smith together during the season, so there is no data around that grouping, and with Brekalo being seemingly the forgotten man in recent weeks, I do not think we are going to see that lineup in the playoffs either, unless there is an injury or a card situation.

For my four I’m going to go with the data, and while I expect that Thórhallsson will probably start over Smith in the next match, the data says the lineup should read Santos, Jansson, Schlegel, and Smith, with their low goals against and high goal differential.

We will yell out fore and drive our way over to six, and move from the defensive grouping to the offensive one. It is rather amazing how many different offensive combinations have played at least one minute this season. By my count, there were 107 unique offensive groupings that the Lions utilized throughout the 41 games.

While on the defensive side, Orlando City settled into a lineup that ended up playing almost exactly one-third of all minutes, on the offensive side, the most common lineup just barely reached half that number, and the six lineups that played the most together did not even play half of the total minutes available this season (players listed alphabetically, as I could not come up with an easy way to depict the offensive formation in a table).

No other attacking grouping even played one game’s worth of minutes together all season, but I do want to include the statistics from three additional groupings, because as you see here they were prolific, albeit in small samples:

I do not expect that any of these groupings would actually continue to score at this rate if they played more minutes together, but the two lineups with Araújo and Cartagena seem like lineups that the Lions could use if trailing, and even the bottom row where Nico Lodeiro would be in for Araújo could be possible as well, since Cartagena is generally more of an offensive threat than Araújo if the coaching staff decided to move to one holding midfielder or if they needed to choose one of the two to sub out.

Going back to the commonly used lineups, the question still remains on whether the group of five (Ivan Angulo, Araújo, Cartagena, Martin Ojeda and Facundo Torres) should play more minutes with Ramiro Enrique or Duncan McGuire. The data says they are more efficient with McGuire, to the tune of an additional half a goal per 90 minutes, but most of the McGuire minutes with this group have been played later in the match, when Orlando City was already ahead and the opposition was tired and chasing an equalizer. Enrique’s minutes have nearly all been as a starter since mid-summer, so he generally faces a fresh defense and an even scoreline, so the defenders are not taking as many risks.

Two lineups that are not in either of these tables, because they were each used for only 30 minutes this season, are Araújo, Cartagena, Enrique, Luis Muriel, Ojeda, and Torres and Araújo, Cartagena, Enrique, McGuire, Muriel, and Torres, and they each scored one goal in their time together for a goals-per-90-minutes average of 3.00. Both of those lineups do not contain Angulo, which sacrifices his speed and recovery ability to get back on defense, but they do include every primary creative attacking player except Lodeiro. The samples are too small to be quantitatively confident in their success, but the qualitative side of looking at those names and thinking about how they could line up is one that is exciting to consider with the wealth of attacking talent that they possess.

All of that said, I am going to to cheat a little bit and choose for my six to be Angulo, Araújo, Cartagena, Duncmiro Enriguire, Ojeda, and Torres, a grouping that is +10 for the season in goal differential and averages 1.79 goals scored per 90 minutes while only giving up 0.85 goals scored per 90 minutes. The group with Enrique is better defensively, giving up 0.59 goals per 90 minutes, as compared to 1.33 for the group with McGuire, while the group with McGuire is better offensively, scoring 2.12 goals per 90 minutes, as compared to 1.61 with Enrique.

Alright, so we have our two, our four and our six, and as promised we are going to skip the eight and go to the 11. If we look at the full 11-player lineup that we chose (using Pedro Gallese as the goalkeeper), we had a back line of Santos, Jansson, Schlegel, and Smith; holding midfielders Araújo and Cartagena; attacking midfielders Angulo, Ojeda, and Torres; and Enrique or McGuire at striker. That lineup played together only twice all season, both with Enrique as the striker, and they were +3 during the 110 minutes that they were on the field together, scoring three goals and giving up zero.

It is hard to lose when you give up zero goals, though Orlando City did manage to do so against Cruz Azul (kind of, it was a shootout loss after a draw), but when you average scoring 2.45 goals per 90 minutes and give up 0.00 goals per 90 minutes, that sounds like a winning lineup.

In fact, of all the lineups that played together for more than 75 minutes this season, that lineup does have the best goal differential per 90 minutes. Just as with some of the attacking groupings, there were some lineups that had better goal differentials per 90 minutes in a limited sample size of minutes, but in looking at the groups that played the most minutes, it is the 11-man group from the previous paragraph that performed the best per 90 minutes.

The 11-man lineup that was used the most was Gallese as goalkeeper; a back line of Santos, Jansson, Schlegel, and Thórhallsson; holding midfielders Araújo and Cartagena; attacking midfielders Angulo, Ojeda, and Torres; and Enrique as striker. That group was +7 for the season in nearly 300 minutes together, a goal differential of +2.17 per 90 minutes, which is also Borat-level very nice.

While it was a rough beginning to the season for Orlando City, as the year went on the Lions settled into lineups and rotations that maximized their abilities, as evidenced by their season-ending run of 11-3-3 in all competitions since the calendar turned to July. Óscar Pareja has identified his preferred lineup, and the data and the gut feelings he has around who to play are nearly exactly matched in terms of playing the right players in combination with one another.

Whether it is the two, the four, the six or the 11, Pareja knows who to play, I reckon.

Vamos Orlando!