The State of Orlando City at the Halfway Point of the MLS Season

I attended my high school reunion this past weekend (let’s agree not to discuss how many years it has been since I graduated), and late in the evening on Saturday night a karaoke machine appeared. What to my wondering ears did I hear but a great many hits that came from yesteryear. One of those hits, naturally, was karaoke staple “Livin’ on a Prayer” from Bon Jovi, with the famous line of “ohhhhh, we’re halfway there” which every…single…person in attendance sang along with. We probably gave karaoke a bad name.

Orlando City did not have a game during this weekend, but after its last game — one we can also agree not to discuss — the Lions also are halfway there, with halfway there in this case being the halfway point of the MLS regular season. Being that we are at the halfway point, I thought it would be a good time to check in on their performance thus far, so let’s take a look at how the squad is doing in some key metrics.

We shall start on defense, because defense wins championships and because, as Linkin Park sings on one of my son’s favorite songs, when talking about a soccer lineup we usually work up from the bottom. Using Opta’s tracking from fbref.com, here is how Orlando City fared on defense during the first 17 games (MLS Avg. is the average of every team except Orlando City):

The first four rows are pretty self-explanatory, with the team just outside the top third (MLS has 30 teams) in keeping the opponents from putting shots on target and into the net. Prior to the most recent game, the one I do not want to talk about, like Bruno, the team was ranked 10th, giving up 1.19 goals per 90 minutes, but the disastrous first 32 minutes against Chicago knocked OCSC down a spot. In fairness, Chicago has one of the league’s best offenses, but still. Yuck.

The bottom two rows in the table above are the fun advanced stat metrics, with Non-Penalty Goals – Expected Goals being the comparison of actual goals allowed thus far this season to expected goals allowed, and since the Lions’ value is negative, that means that they have given up fewer goals than they were expected to. The defense is performing better than the MLS average, but because several defenses are significantly overperforming against expected goals, the team is only ranked 14th.

Where the Lions are doing much better is in the goalkeeper-focused stat of Post Shot Expected Goals – Goals Allowed, which is the stat that takes into account not just the location of the shot but also how well the shot was struck. In this case, a positive value is good, as it means that the expected goals allowed is greater than the actual goals allowed, and Orlando City’s goalkeepers did well to put the team in the top 10 in this metric.

The last area to look at on the defensive side is the lineups that have been used the most on the back line thus far, and unlike in past seasons, there is a clear first-choice back line playing most of the minutes (1,530 total minutes have been played) through the first half of the season (players listed from left to right just as they play on the field):

I am interested to see what happens in the second half with regard to the back line, as I am not confident that by crunch time in October that it will still be the four on the top row of that chart who are the first choice back line. That said, this group is averaging only giving up 1.10 goals per 90 minutes and is +8 for the season, and the group that played the most in 2024 gave up 1.37 goals per 90 minutes and finished at only +2. Coming off a two-week break, we will see who gets the starts, and whether Rafael Santos can reclaim the left back position and/or if David Brekalo moves inside to center back. Robin Jansson and Alex Freeman are not going anywhere, but the other two spots may see some changes in the upcoming months.

On the whole, Orlando City’s defense has been solid but not spectacular in MLS play. The Lions have seven shutouts, but they also have seven games of giving up at least two goals and four games of at least three goals allowed. Some of the defensive lapses have been pretty rough, and an overall performance that puts them right on the cusp of the top third but squarely not in the top third feels right to me with how they have played this season.

And now from defense to offense, where there has been much more variation in the lineups and much better performance overall, though as I wrote a few weeks ago, I think the offense should be performing even better than it has. Looking at the same statistics as we did for the defense, plus a few more, we can see that the Orlando City offense is a top 10 offense in the most critical metric of all, goals scored, but not in some of the other metrics, which is a cause for concern:

The Lions are still on pace to set a club record for goals scored in the MLS regular season, and had they scored one additional goal during the first 17 games, they would find themselves in the top three for goals scored per 90 minutes. Orlando City played a volume game in the first half of the season, ranking eighth in shots on target per 90 minutes, allowing the team to offset a lower-than-league-average performance in the percentage of shots that ended up on target. When the Lions put their shots on target, they converted them better than most, but the team struggled all season long with the final product, as evidenced by the poor performances in the percentage of shots that went on target and the conversion of what Opta deemed to be big chances.

Fellow Floridians Inter Miami converted its big chances at nearly double the rate of Orlando City, and if the Lions converted at that same rate, they would have scored 0.88, or basically one, more goal per game. It is an oversimplification to say this, but I will point it out anyway, the Lions lost two games by one goal and tied six games, and an extra goal in any of those games would have earned Orlando City more points, and with just three more points they would be sitting in second place in the conference. During the preseason, I predicted Orlando City would finish third in the Eastern Conference, so yes, I am a bit salty about all of the dropped points.

Coming back to the offensive metrics, Orlando City is outperforming its expected goals err…expectation…but not by so much that the Lions are among the top teams in the league. Where they are at the top is in the goal-scoring by their three Designated Players, and with the recent injury news about Duncan McGuire the DPs will need to continue that goal-scoring form to get results.

In looking at the attacking lineups, no group has even played the equivalent of three full games together through the first 17 games of the season. Injuries and untimely (read: bleeping stupid) red cards contributed to the large amount of different lineups, and by my count, the team has already rolled out 55 different attacking groups thus far this season. The five groups that played the most constitute only 56% of the total minutes, and no group seems to have established itself as the favorite to emerge as Óscar Pareja’s go-to group.

The group in the top row may have the inside track, but it was in the second half of the season in 2024 when Ramiro Enrique seized the starting role and Luis Muriel started to excel in a supersub role, so the door is open for any of these, or other, attacking groups to establish themselves as that go-to starting group. The MLS Secondary Transfer Window opens on July 24, and that could be a time to bring in another player to compete for offensive minutes as well.

On the whole, Orlando City’s offense has been really good, bordering on great. No team is immune to bad games, but with 31 goals in 17 games, the team has been far more of a real lion than a paper lion on the offensive side of the ball. Long-time fans of Orlando City will remember several (2017, 2018, 2019, 2022) seasons when the team scored fewer than 45 goals during the full 34-game season, so to see nearly two goals per game this season has been a great sight.

Orlando City has a near-top 10 defense and an offense that is among the best in the league, and if the Lions had just kept their heads instead of receiving not one, not two, but three ridiculous red cards, they likely would be in a league table position that is more fitting for how well they played for most of those first-half games.

Soccer is always a game of inches and milliseconds, and the Lions can point to a whole series of almosts and what-ifs that would have/could have/should have led to different results. They did not happen though, which is why the team sits at only 1.59 points earned per match, 11th best in MLS and placing them in seventh in the Eastern Conference.

Historically, Orlando City plays better in the second half of the season than the first, and if this team can repeat that pattern and execute just a little bit better, it will once again be primed to make a deep run in the playoffs. During the past three seasons, the OCSC season ended in the first round (2022), conference semifinal (2023), and conference final (2024), and I think this team has the ability to continue that run of advancement and make it to MLS Cup.

And speaking of run, the highlight of that karaoke I mentioned earlier was not New Jersey natives Bon Jovi, but rather a classmate of mine absolutely crushing a performance of a song by a different New Jersey icon, the Boss, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born To Run.”

Let’s hope that at the end of the season we are all singing along together as well, specifically to another classic rock anthem — Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”