Orlando City’s Supersonic Defensive Lineup

My parents are in town visiting this week, and on Wednesday night our whole family went in the pool and played a spirited game of Marco…Pašalić. This has nothing to do with my article, but I highly recommend that all Orlando City fans make this switch from Polo to Pašalić when playing that game in the pool. Coincidentally, I wrote about Mr. Pašalić this week in our exclusive newsletter, UpRoar, that you can receive every Monday, 52 weeks a year, by clicking on this link and supporting The Mane Land. And now, on with the show.

Iconic rock band Oasis performed together for the first time in years last Friday evening, literally getting the band back together for a huge concert tour that will likely be one of the biggest tours in the world, if not the biggest, in 2025. Last week, I wrote about mirages, and this week I am bringing up an oasis. Clearly I have deserts on my mind. I have never been through the desert, not even while riding a horse with no name, but this article is brought to you by the letter D, as in deserts, desserts (which I like much more than deserts), and defense.

Writing about soccer defense is much more difficult than writing about soccer offense, because most of the sport’s defensive statistics center around individual defensive plays, and those plays do not tell us a whole lot about how well a team’s defense is performing.

For example, tackles won is clearly a defensive statistic, but does knowing how many tackles a team wins per game clearly indicate whether a defense is good or not? Here are two MLS teams and their tackles won per 90 minutes thus far this season:

• Team A: 12.3 tackles won, first in MLS.
• Team B: 7.76 tackles, won, 30th in MLS.

Team A is Philadelphia and Team B is Columbus, two of the league’s top performing teams in the standings, and yet they are at the opposite end of the rankings for tackles won. The top-ranked team in the Eastern Conference, Cincinnati, has the ninth-most tackles won per 90 minutes, The best team in the west, San Diego, ranks 20th. The correlation between tackles won per 90 minutes and points earned per 90 minutes is only 0.15, which means that there is not a strong relationship between the two variables.

Tackles won is a good metric for the evaluation of an individual defender but is not a useful metric to look at for the team as a whole, and if you look through commonly kept defensive statistics, I think they all can be looked at similarly. Blocked shots, clearances, fouls, interceptions (of note here, a certain Team O ranks dead last in the league in interceptions per 90 minutes), and tackles are all important and can tell somewhat of a story, but that story is mostly about that individual defender and not the game itself.

What tells the story about a defense is really quite simple: where does it allow shots from and do those shots go into the back of the net? We often caveat the use of expected goals (xG) on this site, but there is no caveat here this week, because xG is a good measure of the defense’s ability to prevent shots from good goal-scoring locations. Goals are the game’s most important metric, so of course they need to be included as well. As such, let’s take a look at Orlando City’s defensive groupings by expected goals allowed and real goals allowed, adding in a layer of whether the opponent was a team currently ranked in the top third, middle third, or bottom third of MLS teams in points earned per game.

For the tables below I have included every Orlando City back line combination (players ordered from left to right as they played on the field) that played at least 90 minutes together during MLS play. The total minutes for these seven groupings make up 85% of all minutes played for the Lions, and while there are 18 other groups that have played together, it did not seem necessary to include all of them.

Let’s start by looking at expected goals allowed (all data from Opta’s analysis on fbref.com) — the measure of the ability of a defense to limit shots allowed from dangerous locations.

This is a heatmap, so dark green (closer to zero) is good and dark red (higher numbers) is bad. As mentioned in my article last week, Orlando City has been pretty good against the league’s best teams and not as good against teams in the middle. Some of that is clearly on display here with how the defense allowed more shots and/or shots from more dangerous locations per 90 minutes against teams in the middle third of MLS than against the top teams. Allowing expected goals is an indicator of a defense’s performance, but allowing actual goals is just a little more important. Below is the table of actual goals allowed per 90 minutes, and right away you will see some darker red, but don’t miss out on the dark green in the upper left either.

Yes, it is indeed the case that in 248 minutes against teams in the top 10 — in this case, Philadelphia, Miami, and Portland — Orlando City’s top defensive grouping of David Brekalo, Robin Jansson, Rodrigo Schlegel, and Alex Freeman held all three opponents scoreless while playing as a back four. I said it in that way because the Philadelphia game on April 5 was a tight one, with Kyle Smith coming on for the final 22 minutes and, in my eyes, joining the back four as a back five, and so I coded it that way.

Regardless, Philadelphia did not score in that match, so whether as a back four or back five the defense held the Union scoreless, and aside from the season opener, when Robin Jansson unexpectedly was injured during pregame warmups, the story all season long in games against the top teams has been a story about great defense. Orlando City shut out the three teams I mentioned in the prior paragraph, and while the Lions allowed two goals by Cincinnati, one of those was a free kick from 35 yards away that Pedro Gallese saves nearly every time, but unfortunately did not that time.

Excluding Evander’s free kick, the team gave up one goal in 360 minutes against top 10 opponents, and even that one goal was a product of a Lions defense that was pushed up the field trying to get an equalizer and got caught on a counterattack. The back line is not solely responsible for the defense, but it is a critical component, and perhaps it is that those players rise to the occasion against the best opponents or maybe it is something else. Whatever it is, I hope it is sustainable, because the schedule still has seven games remaining against top 10 teams, and it sure would be nice to keep those top teams to limited numbers of goals.

The trio of Brekalo, Jansson, and Schlegel primarily played with Freeman but also with Dagur Dan Thórhallsson and Kyle Smith at points, and those three together with any other right back have played 1,052 minutes and only allowed 1.03 goals per 90 minutes in MLS play (1.03 goals allowed per 90 minutes, which ranks second in MLS. Only Philadelphia at 1.00 is better). It should not be a surprise that the team’s three best defenders play extremely good defense together, and while we will not see them together against Montréal on Saturday due to Jansson being out with yellow card accumulation, they should be back together, likely with Freeman, for the game next Wednesday against New York City FC.

On the season, the Lions are allowing 1.33 goals per game, 12th in the league, but they have been extremely leaky in recent games, giving up 12 goals in the last six matches. Prior to that, they were averaging 1.07 goals allowed per game, and I think it is high time they get back to playing binary defense, only giving up zero or one in every game.

Computer scientists loved that reference.

Defensive statistics are not yet as advanced in soccer as offensive statistics are, so while I spent a lot of time with the available defensive data from sites like fbref.com, whoscored.com, and fotmob.com, what ultimately stood out to me the most was the simple measure of goals allowed by opponent (I know, I know, who would have thought?). I wanted to give the Orlando City defense some love with creative data, but instead what I think is that they just need to keep the band of Brekalo, Jansson, and Schlegel playing together, as they make pretty great music when Óscar Pareja puts them in the lineup.

In honor of Oasis, a seminal band for those of us born in the early 1980s, some (read: I) might say that if Pareja acquiesces, they will not often have to look back in anger, and at the end of the season there might be a champagne supernova waiting for the Lions by The (wonder) Wall.

Vamos Orlando!