Orlando City sent backup goalkeeper Mason Stajduhar to Real Salt Lake on Jan. 15 for $50,000 in General Allocation Money and RSL’s natural second-round pick in the 2026 MLS SuperDraft. The move resulted in the end of the Lions’ longest-tenured player, but provides an opportunity for another.

Stajduhar initially signed for the first team on Nov. 9, 2015, as a Homegrown Player. He was largely out of sight for the first few years of his professional career, not even appearing for Orlando City B. However, he eventually became the primary backup to the starter Pedro Gallese and showed his ability. His appearances primarily came early in U.S. Open Cup games or when the primary starter was away on international duty with Peru, but he played well when given the opportunity.

While Stajduhar never made more than six appearances in a season for the MLS side, he had the opportunity to prove himself and his development. It’s hard to say whether the 27-year-old will get more playing time with his new club, but his departure opens the door for another Homegrown goalkeeper.

Born in Venezuela, Javier Otero moved to the United States with his family and joined the Orlando City Academy in 2017 as a 14-year-old. He signed with OCB in 2020, backing up Austin Aviza, and became the regular starter for the Young Lions in 2022 at 17 years of age.

Otero has often been a lifesaver for the Young Lions, being forced to make an incredibly high number of saves. During his first season as a starter, the young shot stopper made a league-high 100 saves from 130 shots on target.

Otero was signed to a Homegrown contract on July 10, 2023, beginning his tenure as a first-team player. He remained with OCB since he was third string, but was forced away from the reserve side when Stajduhar suffered a broken tibia and fibula in his right leg during a June 28, 2024 game in New York. Otero finished the contest, conceding three goals on a difficult night, and backed up Gallese for the remainder of the season.

The injury to Stajduhar left Otero in a bit of a predicament. Since he had to be with the first team as the primary backup, he was unable to play for OCB. As a result, the substitution appearance against New York City FC was his final action in 2024.

Moving Stajduhar and elevating Otero to the primary backup makes sense for the Lions. Gallese doesn’t seem to want to leave and Orlando City isn’t eager for his departure. However, eventually, the 34-year-old Peruvian’s time in Orlando will end and the club needs his replacement. Otero is five years younger than Stajduhar, giving him more time to develop for when Gallese does depart.

The brief appearance by Otero in 2024 clearly isn’t enough to determine if he can play at the MLS level. While he likely won’t play substantial minutes in 2025, he’ll probably have at least five starts throughout the season. This might be during a less important competition than the league or while Gallese is away on international duty.

Gallese is currently on his option year, meaning he’ll be out of contract following the 2025 season unless the club reaches an extension agreement. At this point, it’s hard to see him leaving so soon. But if he does, Orlando City needs to know what it has behind him.

As for Otero, this is his opportunity to prove himself at a higher level. He was fantastic in MLS NEXT Pro action, but MLS competition will provide a much greater challenge than the third division league. This season will give Otero the opportunity to prove to the club and himself that he can take over the number one spot one day, something the higher-ups clearly believe he can do.

The 2025 season will be an interesting one for the Lions. They made the Eastern Conference final last year and are bringing back most of their roster. Despite losing the club’s all-time leading goal scorer, expectations are high that they can match or surpass last year‘s accomplishments.

The upcoming season will also tell us a lot about the future. The departure of Facundo Torres means other players will have to step up. While Gallese will spend the 2025 campaign with the Lions, it’s unclear how long he’ll remain. Otero’s appearances with the first team, no matter their length, will indicate whether he can fill those large shoes when the time comes.

Hello, Mane Landers! I hope all is well with you down in Florida. I’ve been staying busy working and covering high school sports. Besides that, I was able to watch a few Premier League matches over the weekend. Let’s all wish a happy belated birthday to Orlando Pride midfielder Angelina, who turned 25 on Sunday. We have plenty to cover today, so let’s get to the links.

Orlando City Defeats Atletico Mineiro in Penalties After Scoreless Draw

In its first preseason match of 2025, Orlando City edged past Atletico Mineiro 6-5 on penalties after a scoreless draw at Inter&Co Stadium in the FC Series. The Lions had to go through seven rounds of penalties to defeat Atletico Mineiro and clinch the Inter&Co Trophy. Both teams had chances throughout the match, but after 90 minutes of play, the game went to penalties. After being tied 5-5 after six rounds, Joran Gerbet scored in the seventh round andPedro Gallese saved Bruno Fuchs’s shot to win the shootout for the Lions. Orlando City will be in Mexico for camp for the next week and will face Forge FC. The Lions will take on Inter Miami in Tampa on Feb. 14 at Raymond James Stadium.

Lions Reportedly Shift Focus Away From Marco Pasalic

According to Tom Bogert, Orlando City is reportedly shifting their focus from Croatian winger Marco Pasalic to other transfer targets, as the 24-year-old is undecided about his future.

The Lions were reportedly in talks to sign Pasalic from HNK Rijeka last week, as they look to fill their open Designated Player spot following the record-breaking transfer of forward Facundo Torres to Palmeiras last month. The clock is ticking for the Lions to sign a new Designated Player, with Orlando’s season opener set for Feb. 22.

Naomi Girma Completes Record Transfer Move to Chelsea

United States Women’s National Team and former San Diego Wave defender Naomi Girma has completed her transfer to Chelsea in a record-breaking deal. The transfer fee is reportedly agreed at $1.1 million, making her the first player to break the $1 million mark in women’s soccer. Girma signed a four-and-a-half-year deal with Chelsea after three seasons with the Wave. She has 44 caps for the USWNT and was an integral part of the squad that won a gold medal at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.

MLS Transfer Roundup

Major League Soccer had another busy weekend with some notable transfer moves. The Chicago Fire signed midfielder Rominigue Kouame on loan from La Liga 2 side Cadiz CF for the 2025 MLS season, with an option to purchase. The Fire also transferred midfielder Federico Navarro to Argentine first division side Club Atletico Rosario Central for an undisclosed transfer fee. FC Cincinnati is reportedly in negotiations to sign center back Gilberto Flores.

LAFC has agreed to transfer midfielder Mateusz Bogusz to Cruz Azul for a fee reportedly over $10 million. The New York Red Bulls have transferred forward Dante Vanzeir to KAA Gent in Belgium. The Red Bulls have also reportedly expressed interest in signing Tottenham Hotspur forward Timo Werner, who is on loan from Red Bull Leipzig.

Free Kicks

• Former Lion Daryl Dike is close to full fitness and is back training as he looks set to return to action for West Brom. Dike has been recovering from a ruptured Achilles injury from last season that has kept him sidelined for almost a year.

• Christian Pulisic scored a penalty kick, while Yunus Musah added an assist for AC Milan in a 3-2 victory over Parma on Sunday.
• Josh Sargent scored twice in his first start for Norwich City in nearly three months as his side defeated Swansea City 5-1 on Saturday.
• Wolverhampton has reportedly expressed interest in signing Real Betis and USMNT midfielder Johnny Cardoso.

That will do it for me today, Mane Landers. Enjoy your Monday, and I’ll see you next time.

I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to quantify soccer players and soccer teams, because even though I love soccer purely as a game, I am always thinking about how to measure what I see as well. There is a scene in the movie Moneyball in which Brad Pitt, acting in the role of Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, says that he does not even watch the games. In his eyes, he has done all the analyzing and put the team in the best situation in which to succeed, but the games are random, so he does not even watch.

I will never reach the point where I would rather just look at the statistics to see what happened as opposed to watching the games, but I will also never stop trying to figure out ways to channel Tina Turner and figure out who is simply the best. And so, while we are still in off-season mode and do not have any new games to look at, I thought I would look at something that is always enjoyable: offensive attacking players.

ESPN soccer writer Ryan O’Hanlon, a favorite of mine, recently wrote an article ranking the top 100 men’s attacking players in Europe based on data. In that article, he created a formula for how he ranked the players, and I took that formula and applied it to MLS. His formula is pretty simple, as it has four inputs:

• Goals
• Expected Assists
• Progressive Carries
• Progressive Passes

The idea is to find the players who put the most pressure on a defense, and who puts more pressure on a defense than a player who scores goals, completes passes to teammates in scoring positions (regardless of whether they actually score or not), carries (dribbles) the ball at least 10 yards towards the goal in the attacking half of the field, or completes passes of 10 yards or more towards the goal in the attacking half of the field?

Basketball coaches always talk about being in “triple threat” position when you receive the ball, as you want to be able to dribble, pass, or shoot, and while scoring in soccer is slightly different than basketball, the idea is still the same — goals are created by players dribbling, passing, or shooting.

O’Hanlon’s formula is the following: Goals Scored + Expected Assists + 0.0113 (Progressive Carries + Progressive Passes)

I know there is an obvious question when you see this formula, and that is about how did he arrive at the 0.0113 value. Looking at the 2022 and 2023 seasons in Europe’s top leagues, he determined that a goal was scored per every 88.44 progressive actions, and so, as I know all of you just did in your head, one goal per 88.44 progressive actions = 1 divided by 88.44 = 0.0113. Actual goals scored and passes completed to teammates in shooting positions are valued much more highly than just attacking dribbles and forward moving passes, but if we are looking to find out who is attacking during each game I liked how he laid out his reasoning for what he called his version of a soccer “game score,” modeled after a concept created by the father of sports analytics, Bill James, for starting pitchers in baseball.

For those of you still awake, it is now about to pay off, because now we will look at Orlando City’s players going back to 2018, the first year Opta started tracking expected assists and progressive carries and passes for MLS. We will look at this statistic in two different ways: once as an overall score, which favors the players who played in more games and therefore contributed more attacking plays, and then we will normalize all the data on a per-90-minute calculation, to see who made the most of their minutes on the field.

Without any further ado, and without any Freddy Adu, your top 10 Orlando City attacking players since 2018 by their aggregated full season game scores (reminder that the 2020 MLS season was 23 games instead of 34; all data from fbref.com):

I cannot say that I am surprised that Nani and Facundo Torres lead the way for Orlando City attacking players. They both played a lot of minutes and had a lot of the ball during their time in purple, and they are two of the best offensive players to ever play for the Lions. Data for expected assists and progressive actions was not available in Kaká’s era, but had it been, I am sure he would have made this list as well. The player who likely would have benefitted the most, however, is Cyle Larin, as even with no available data for expected assists or progressive actions, he would have ranked fifth with just his 2015 season tally of 17 goals.

Any metric that heavily weights goals favors forwards, as they usually score the most goals, as evidenced by the fact that Harry Kane led all of the major European leagues (England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) in 2024 with a score of 44.0, and Denis Bouanga led MLS at 32.6. Looking at Orlando City though, it is quickly evident that the team has primarily been led by attacking midfielders as opposed to forwards when it comes to the attack. Larin might have passed Nani for the single-season lead had there been other data for him, but perhaps not, as he was a finisher and not someone who was involved as much in the buildup.

The last item around the aggregated season-long totals is to look at how far away Orlando City’s leading players always were as compared to the MLS leader. The Lions have only averaged 1.5 goals/game or more (in MLS regular season play) during five of their 10 seasons, and only at least 1.7 twice. Larin remains the only player to score more than 14 goals in a regular season, and so for any metric where goals are heavily weighted, like this one, which is attempting to evaluate attacking production, Orlando City’s individual players will often lag far behind those from other teams, even though the full team has been successful in recent years.

We could also look at this data in a different way, and instead of looking at the aggregated scores for the season, which benefits those who play the most minutes, look at per-90-minute game scores instead. In many cases I prefer to normalize the data and evaluate everyone not on totals but by looking at per-90 statistics, but in this case I will present the per-90 data, but I think the raw data matters more, because I wanted to see who had the best overall attacking season, and overall production matters more than per-minute production in this case. If you disagree, I will happily entertain your reasoning in the comments.

Looking at game scores normalized per 90 minutes, Orlando City’s top 10 since 2018 looks as follows (among players who played at least 500 minutes in a season):

Some of the same full-season leaders are on this list as well, but we also see the entrance of several players who rarely had the burden of being expected to play a full game. McGuire, Benji Michel, and Ramiro Enrique were more supersub or rabbit-type players who started with the expectation of going around 60 minutes or came off the bench for the final third of the game. While they had to be productive to make the top 10 ranking, their smaller sample size of minutes helps them on a per-90-minute calculation.

The Money Badger, Chris Mueller, makes this list twice, and while his post-Orlando City career has likely not been what he hoped, I wonder whether I did not appreciate how well he performed while a Lion. Torres played a lot of minutes during all three of his seasons with the club, and so while he racked up counting numbers (which it is important to note are what matters when trying to win games), his per-minute performance knocks two of his three seasons out of the top 10 (2024 was 16th and 2022 was 24th). Nani remains elite, whether by totals or per-minute calculations, and McGuire’s 2023 season moves to the top for Orlando City. That season ranked fifth in 2024 and 33rd overall among all MLS seasons since 2018, and makes it hurt all the more that he will be out for a few months to start the 2025 season.

It sure would be nice to have some more attacking options joining the team for 2025 with McGuire’s injury and Torres’ departure. I am just saying. Loudly.

This article is about Orlando City, but I wanted to briefly flip to the Pride to note that Barbra Banda’s 2024 full-season game score was 19.2 in a season that had eight fewer games than a standard MLS season. Banda ranked second in the league in overall game score and game score per 90 minutes, which for her was 1.04. That darned Temwa Chawinga (26.6 total, 1.12 per 90) of the Kansas City Current beat her out for both the total and per-90 lead.

As with any metric that tries to pull in different parts of a player’s performance, nothing is perfect, and any measurement formula could be tweaked until the lions sleep at night. In looking at how the results shook out across the major European leagues in O’Hanlon’s original article and in my own application to MLS, I found that the rankings seemed to work to push players who pass the eye test and the math test (my favorite test, to the surprise of no one) to the top of these charts.

I plan to continue to look at this metric, among others, throughout the 2025 season to see how Orlando City and the Orlando Pride’s players are performing. I hope to see players in purple at the top of the charts, though at this point I am more confident in those being Pride players than Lions. With every week that passes, we get closer to the 2025 season, and comparing predictions and hopes to actual results, and I am as excited as ever for the new seasons to start.

Vamos Orlando!