What We Can Learn from Tracking Where Orlando City Players Came From

I am sorry for what I am about to do to everyone, but I have to do it. The refrain from a song that I do not even like has been stuck in my head for days, because it fits so well with this week’s article, but I feel bad that you are about to involuntarily find yourself playing a fiddle and stomping around the room you are in, which may cause problems depending on where you are reading this.

Or, perhaps while on your third lap of the general area, you will see someone else exhibiting the same behavior, and you two will immediately become life-long best friends due to your mutual love of The Mane Land and our Orlando soccer clubs. Probably in the reverse order of how I wrote that though.

Without any further ado, I bring back to your consciousness a song from before the Civil War, and the line that has been stuck in my head for days:

Where did you come from?
Where did you go?
Where did you come from
Cotton-Eye Joe?

The rest of the article will be below when your euphoria wears off.

The reason I thought of this song was because I was reading all of the news about players Orlando City was trying to sign from other clubs, or clubs where current Orlando City players were allegedly considering transferring to, and I was thinking about whether these were steps up or steps down in the global soccer hierarchy. In most American professional sports, our teams are considered the best in the world, so players want to get here and stay here. In soccer, however, Major League Soccer is not considered the best league in the world.

Opta, one of the world’s leading soccer analytics companies, ranked MLS as the ninth strongest league in the world in October of 2024, the last time the company released its global league rankings. Globalfootballrankings concurs, also ranking MLS ninth. There is no shame in being the ninth-best league in the world. In fact, I think this is actually a major achievement considering that the first season of MLS was in 1996 and many of the leagues ranked lower than MLS have been around for significantly more years, and are in countries where soccer is the most popular sport.

As you might imagine, our group of writers at The Mane Land closely — some might say obsessively — follows every piece of news around the Orlando clubs. We talk about every player rumored to be possibly coming here, and consider the possible destinations for every player rumored to be departing and whether those would be steps up or down in our eyes — our discerning and never-biased eyes. And since we converse on an internal Mane Land Slack channel, I guess we could say that these players cannot escape our private eyes. We see their every move.

Hall & Oates may have crept into your head with those lines, and if they did not, then they definitely should have, but let us return to Cotton-Eye Joe and where did he come from and where did he go? Well, for this article the answer to where did he go is very simple, and that is Orlando City. I went back through every player on the senior roster and found the professional club where each player had most recently played, and went into Opta’s database of club rankings to see where they are ranked right now. Of course, many of Orlando City’s players joined the club several years ago, but alas Opta does not have a historical point in time tool I could use to see where a club ranked in the past.

These club rankings will likely not exactly match where the club was when the current Orlando City player was on the squad, but my bet is that each club is in at least a somewhat similar position as to where they were when their player became a Lion. So now let us look at the Orlando City Where Did He Come From list, complete with the current Opta ranking of each player’s team as of Feb 7, 2025. Orlando City is currently ranked No. 127, for comparison purposes.

A few quick notes on this list:

• Ten players on the senior roster (Alex Freeman, Colin Guske, Michael Halliday, Favian Loyola, Carlos Mercado, Shak Mohammed, Javier Otero, Tahir Reid-Brown, Yutaro Tsukada, and Thomas Williams) all played with Orlando City B last season.
• Duncan McGuire came to Orlando City from Creighton University via the MLS SuperDraft, but he did play 11 times for USL League Two club Lane United (Eugene, OR) during the summer of 2022, making that the last professional team he had played for before Orlando City.
• I did not include any of the players drafted in the most recent MLS SuperDraft, since as of the time that I am writing this none have signed a contract with Orlando City.

I found it interesting that some players from clubs towards the bottom of the list —Cear Araújo, Ivan Angulo, Dagur Dan Thórhallsson, and Wilder Cartagena — were all near the top in terms of minutes played during the 2024 season, while some of the players from clubs closer to the top of the list, like Luis Muriel, Nico Lodeiro, and David Brekalo, primarily came off the bench.

Orlando City’s ranking of 127 also stood out to me, as did what Opta calls its rating. Opta calibrates its ratings so that a rating of 100 goes to the team ranked as the best in the world, and then every team in the world indexes off of that 100 to create the rest of the ratings and rankings.

Orlando City’s Opta rating is currently 82.8, ranking them the aforementioned 127th in the world, and you can basically read that as the Opta rankings assessing that Orlando City is about 83% as good as the number one team on the men’s side, Liverpool. I did not enjoy typing that about Liverpool, though I know The Mane Land’s David Rohe is nodding along and saying yes, of course Liverpool is considered the best men’s team in the world. The Orlando Pride, incidentally, rank 11th on the women’s side.

Back to Orlando City, only three of the team’s current players came from clubs currently ranked better than the Lions. If Orlando City completes the signing of midfielder Eduard Atuesta, then that three becomes four, as Atuesta plays alongside Facundo Torres with Palmeiras in Brazil, and Palmeiras is currently ranked 55th in the world. Based on player performance though, club pedigree does not seem to actually have any kind of identifiable impact. Because some players came from these clubs years ago, their ranking may have been different in prior years, but I do not think that difference would be so large as to change the general pattern seen in the table I showed. And that pattern was really no pattern at all, with no real association between the pedigree of the former club and a player’s performance while playing for Orlando City.

Sometimes as fans or analysts we get a little overzealous in our thought process around “oh, this player comes from this well-known club so they must be great,” or the flip side of “this player is from this club I have not heard of in this smaller country’s league, so they must not be someone who will be a major difference maker.” I did not know anything about Peñarol or the Uruguayan league when Torres signed with Orlando City, but he left the club as the all-time leading goal scorer and, more importantly, as my son’s favorite ever Lion.

Peñarol ranks slightly higher (117) than Orlando City in Opta’s rankings, so perhaps I should have known more about them as they are close to a top 100 team in the world, but Montevideo Wanderers, the former club of Araújo, is also in the same Uruguayan league and they are ranked more than 750 places behind Orlando City. Araujo has been an amazing player for Orlando City, less prolific than his countryman Torres at scoring goals but every bit as good at his job in central midfield as Torres was out on the wing. One player came from the best team in his league, and a top team on the continent, and the other came from a team in the bottom half of the league who never made it out of domestic competitions.

Both, however, are Orlando City legends in my eyes, two of the best to ever wear purple, even though when both were signed I asked myself, where did he come from?

We are only two weeks away from real games. I hope you are as excited as we are at The Mane Land for the season to start.

Vamos Orlando!