Lions, Pride Show Orlando is a Leading U.S. Soccer City

The 2025 calendar year is upon us, and after an exhaustive recounting of the 2024 season through our Top 10 Moments and our Season in Review articles on every Orlando City and Orlando Pride player, it is time to expand our thoughts to look back not just on the 2024 season, but on the full decade of the 2020s, which is somehow now halfway over. American soccer teams do not operate in the same manner as clubs do in Europe, where a club like Arsenal has both a men’s and women’s soccer team under the same moniker and ownership, but we do have cities, like Orlando, that have men’s and/or women’s teams. What if we looked at American cities to see which cities have produced the best professional soccer results thus far this decade, and looked to see how Orlando compares? What if, indeed. Let’s go.

When I started pulling together all the data for this, I thought it was going to be pretty simple, and I would just use the MLS and NWSL standings and playoff results and then start writing. Easy, like Sunday morning. But then I thought about the U.S. Open Cup, which, in case you forgot (let’s be honest, there is no way you forgot), Orlando City won in 2022. And then I thought that if I was including the U.S. Open Cup, I should also include the Leagues Cup, since every MLS team participated in that competition. And that reminded me of the NWSL x Liga MX Feminil Summer Cup, which then reminded me of other international competitions like the Concacaf Champions Cup, the FIFA Club World Cup, and last but not least, the Concacaf W Champions Cup.

Funny story about that Concacaf W Champions Cup though, it is a brand new competition and it is actually a 2024-2025 tournament, so it will not conclude until later this year. Teams qualified in 2023 to play in a tournament in 2024 that finishes in 2025. Ah FIFA, how I enjoy thee. The Pride will play in the second edition of this cup later this year, by virtue of WINNING ALL THE 2024 NWSL THINGS, but for now I was not able to include the results of the first edition since it still ongoing. My apologies to the two NWSL clubs (Gotham and Portland) still alive in this cup.

Back to all the competitions, here is the official list of competitions that I included (M = men’s competitions and W = women’s competitions)

• M: MLS regular season (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024)
• M: MLS playoffs (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024)
• M: Concacaf Champions Cup (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024)
• M: U.S. Open Cup (2022, 2023, 2024) [2020 and 2021 were not played due to COVID-19]
• M: Leagues Cup (2023, 2024)
• M: FIFA Club World Cup (played every year, Seattle qualified in 2022)
• W: NWSL regular season (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024) [2020 was not played due to COVID-19]
• W: NWSL playoffs (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024)
• W: NWSL x Liga MX Femenil Summer Cup (2024)
• W: NWSL Challenge Cup (2020)
• W: NWSL Fall Series (2020)

I used a pretty simple scoring rubric to allocate points to those teams who did well in each competition — six points to the winner, four for second place, three for third place, two for fourth place, and one for fifth place. Teams could share points, and often did, since in many knockout competitions there would not be a third-place game, so I would assign both teams that lost in a semifinal as the third-place winners and recipients of three points.

For the regular seasons in MLS and in the NWSL I used the league table, and so while for playoff seeding the leagues would use tiebreakers to differentiate among teams, I did not, meaning that the 2023 Pride, for example, tied for fifth place in the NWSL regular season and earned one point for the city of Orlando, even though they ended up seventh overall and out of the playoffs once the league tiebreakers were evaluated. MLS and NWSL use different setups, so I thought that was a fair way to do it. Feel free to disagree with me in the comments. Or, and I like this idea a little better, laud me and write thousands dozens of words of praise for my innovative and creative (read: not really that innovative or creative) method of assigning points.

Enough preamble, it is time to see which cities racked up the points in the 2020s based on the performances by the men’s and women’s teams who play there. Without any further ado:

Now, I can already hear the grumbling, “…but Los Angeles and New York City each have three teams, so of course they have the most points.” I mean, yes, but also no. While New York City has had three teams (New York Red Bulls, New York City FC, and Gotham FC/Sky Blue) for all five years of this decade, Los Angeles only added Angel City during the 2022 season. Additionally, of the 27 cities that had at least one team in MLS or NWSL, eight scored five or fewer points during the first five years of this decade, so while it certainly does help to have three teams, having more teams is not guaranteed to generate success.

The city of Chicago is a great example, the Chicago Fire and Chicago Red Stars both played all five seasons in the 2020s but their combined points (13) rank 14th overall, and behind four cities that only had one club each (Philadelphia, Columbus, Miami and Cincinnati).

I would also like to spend a moment to point out that in recent years there has been great debate about who the current “soccer city of the south” is. MLS and FIFA would love you to believe it is Miami, with how far back they bend to help out that club, but the results on the field do not make that case (Miami ranked 11th by my scoring), though certainly Miami has done much better in the last two years. Atlanta won an MLS Cup in 2018, but during this decade they have done very little, earning only four points. Nashville scored seven points, and Charlotte, which entered MLS in 2022, has only earned one point in three seasons. Houston is probably the city that has the best argument, as the Dash and Dynamo have both had some success, but not to the degree of, you were waiting for it, the City Beautiful.

While Orlando City has now had several years of sustained success under Head Coach Óscar Pareja, including the U.S. Open Cup title in 2022, top-five finishes in the league table in 2020 and 2023, and making the Eastern Conference final in 2024, the Pride’s successes were only really in this past season, but they were massive, as the team claimed both of The Mane Land’s No. 2 and No. 1 moments of 2024 by winning the NWSL Shield and NWSL Cup, respectively. Those two titles account for 12 points by my scoring rubric, two-thirds of the total number of points that Orlando City scored over five seasons. A monster season will do that for you, and in this case it is not a competition between the two teams but a symbiotic relationship, with those points going towards Orlando’s overall totals. That total placed them seventh overall and fifth among cities that have both a men’s and women’s team.

In future years, I expect that there will be more competitions for the women’s teams in the United States to enter, as the entertainment world and FIFA are slowly waking up to the idea that there is an audience for elite soccer played by both men and women, and I hope that it is sooner rather than later that we see a similar number of domestic and international club competitions for both Orlando City and the Orlando Pride to qualify for and compete in.

In 2025, we should see Orlando City in MLS, hopefully the MLS playoffs, Leagues Cup, and possibly the U.S. Open Cup. The Lions did not qualify for the 2025 Concacaf Champions Cup or the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup (I would like to point out that Inter Miami did not really qualify for this tournament either, but is in because it has Lionel Messi on the roster). We should see the Pride in the NWSL, hopefully the NWSL playoffs, Concacaf W Champions Cup, and possibly another tournament still to be determined.

There will be ample opportunities for both clubs to add points to my theoretical city rankings for the decade of the 2020s, and possibly even vault up to top-five-city status. I look forward to watching and writing about it whether they do or not, but it will be whole lot more fun if they add some more banners and hardware to the trophy collection.

Vamos Orlando!