Top 10 Moments of 2024: Orlando Pride sign Zambian Star Barbra Banda

As we count down to the new year of 2025 — which will be Orlando City’s 11th in MLS, the Orlando Pride’s ninth in the NWSL, and OCB’s third in MLS NEXT Pro — and say goodbye to 2024, it’s time to look back at the club’s 10 best moments of the year as selected by The Mane Land staff via vote.

It is fitting that the acquisition of Barbra Banda appears on our Top 10 Moments of the Season list on the eve of Christmas Eve, because in retrospect it is kind of like a Christmas story, but instead of getting a Red Ryder BB gun, we got a BB bombshell dropped on us on March 7, when the Pride announced they had spent $740,000 to acquire Banda from Chinese Women’s Super League side Shanghai Shengli FC. That transfer fee was at the time, and still is, the second highest of all time for a women’s soccer player, and it changed the entire complexion of the 2024 season for the Pride.

Orlando was agonizingly close to making the playoffs during the 2023 season but fell just shy of the final spot, and clearly the Pride were planning to use that failure as a catalyst to improve their performance in 2024. There was a major question about the attack, however, and where the goals were going to come from. The team’s joint top scorer from 2023, Messiah Bright, requested a trade for personal reasons, leaving a team that had only scored an average of 1.23 goals per game (27 goals in 22 games) down her six goals and without an obvious candidate to lead the line up front. The Pride had options on the roster, but questions remained.

And then, Christmas came early. Or maybe we got a second Christmas, or a very late Christmas present from 2023. Let’s not get bogged down on semantics. What matters is all of a sudden the whole soccer world was talking about the Orlando Pride and how they had just acquired a superstar forward for the second time (Alex Morgan was the first; Marta debatably could be the second, but she is more of an attacking midfielder than a pure forward) in club history.

Unlike with Morgan, a U.S. Women’s National Team player and arguably the most well-known women’s player in the world at the time she joined the Pride, most people in the United States knew very little about Banda and her career exploits. I spent a considerable amount of time today researching Banda’s career stats from her years prior to joining the Pride when preparing to write this article — in particular her stats from her four seasons in the Chinese Women’s Super League, and I could not find any sites that showed her season-by-season stats. The press release said that she had scored 41 goals in 52 games, and I was able to find that she scored 18 goals in 2020 and 16 goals in 2023, but I could not find anything on 2021 and 2022, which likely were affected by COVID-19.

All I could find on Banda were her total goals scored and games played, and so therefore not the total minutes played in those 52 games to allow for per-90-minute calculations. Let’s assume she played every minute of every game for Shanghai, giving her the lowest possible goals per 90 minutes during those 52 games and compare her performance during her career in China to all seasons when a player scored at least six goals in the Pride’s history before 2024 (all data from fbref.com except Banda’s):

The Chinese Super League is almost certainly not as deep and as talented as the NWSL, but nearly a goal per 90 minutes is still difficult, especially over 52 games. The reality is that Banda probably did not play every minute of every game either, and that means her goals/90 was likely even closer to 1.00 than her 0.79 showed in the chart.

Speaking of goals/90 of around 1.00, Banda had also played in three games in an Olympics and three games in a World Cup prior to joining the Pride and had scored a cool seven goals in those six games, averaging 1.17 goals per 90 minutes (there is per-game data from those competitions, and Banda never came off the field). The Olympics and World Cup are the biggest stages in women’s soccer and Banda had delivered in both at a precociously young 21 and 23 years old, and now a player with that pedigree was coming to a Pride team returning a solid defense. And with a need for a striker, it seemed like a delightful match for the team playing in the Happiest Place on Earth. After a few years of building the war chest and setting the stage, the Pride were now about to cast one of the world’s best in a leading role.

When the season opened, the addition of Banda had the Pride tied for sixth in the betting odds on ESPN Bet and generally around the middle of the pack in most season previews. Banda did not play in the first few matches, as she was coming off a full season in China and Olympic qualifying games for Zambia, and trying to acclimate to a new league and a new team, but she played her first game on April 19 against San Diego and made her first start on April 26 against Washington. The rest, as they say, is history, and you can be sure that as you check back every day through the end of the year you will read and re-live more about just how well Banda integrated into the Pride’s roster and, spoiler alert, how the Pride brought home some pretty nice shiny new hardware to display inside Inter&Co Stadium.

Banda’s acquisition played a massive part in the Pride’s ascendance during the 2024 season, and you can read all about that and her statistics and accomplishments in her Season in Review piece. And while it is coincidental, it is also perfect that adding a world-class striker came in at No. 9 on our list of top 10 moments for the 2024 season.

Come back through New Year’s Eve as we count down the remainder of the top 10 moments of 2024 for Orlando City, the Orlando Pride, and OCB.

Previous Top Moments of 2024

1. 10. Orlando City’s massive second-half surge clinches top-four spot in Eastern Conference.