How Orlando City Can Still Qualify for the 2026 Concacaf Champions Cup

This weekend is a FIFA international window, and after a hectic August of eight matches Orlando City will finally get a small break, with no game until Sept. 13. The Lions are coming off of a particularly punishing final two weeks of August, when they traveled from Orlando to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Nashville, Nashville to Orlando, Orlando to “Miami,” “Miami” to Orlando, Orlando to Los Angeles, and Los Angeles to Orlando — a total of about 9,000 miles.

The Mane Land’s Nic Josey is our resident aviation guru and flight stalker tracker, so he might know the exact number of miles the team traveled, but in this case, close is going to count in hand grenades, horseshoes, and estimates of mileage between two cities.

In between all of that flying, Orlando City played four soccer matches (three Leagues Cup and one in MLS), and unfortunately, the Lions only won the first one of those. This means that despite having a 75% chance of clinching a Concacaf Champions Cup (CCC) berth via the Leagues Cup route, they were unable to win the semifinal or third-place game, leaving them devoid of an automatic bid.

The good news, however, is that American soccer clubs have four different ways of qualifying for the CCC, and while the Lions will not be going in via finishing in first, second, or third in Leagues Cup, they still could qualify via another route.

As an aside, If I was running the CCC, I would consider removing a team’s automatic bid if one of its players had spit on a staff member from their opponent, another player punch an opposing player, a third player put an opposing player in a headlock for 10 seconds, and a coach who apologized for none of it. That team was Inter Miami though, so it is more likely to somehow get a bye directly into the CCC semifinals than receive any type of real punishment. It is kind of like Jerry Tarkanian’s quote about favoritism in college basketball, when back in the 1980s he said that “the NCAA is so mad at Kentucky, they’re going to give Cleveland State another year of probation.”

I really do not like Inter Miami, so that is enough about the Herons.

Back to the four ways that American teams can qualify for the CCC:

• Winning MLS Cup.
• Winning the U.S Open Cup.
• Finishing first, second, or third in Leagues Cup.
• Finishing first in the Eastern and Western Conference, or being one of the next two highest ranked teams in the Supporters’ Shield rankings.

If you are counting along at home, that makes nine possible spots for American teams, though it is possible that Canadian MLS teams could win MLS Cup or take spots from the last item in the list above, which is tied to the MLS standings at the end of the season.

As an American club, Orlando City started the season with those nine possible routes of entry into the CCC for the third time in club history, but as of this past weekend four of those routes are now closed for the club. The Lions lost access to the U.S. Open Cup route in May, when a team of backups from Nashville came into Inter&Co Stadium and upset them. They lost access to the three Leagues Cup spots by finishing fourth in that tournament.

This leaves Orlando City with two routes, both of which are achievable, but only with major runs of form over a six-week period.

Let’s start with the path that’s easiest to explain, which is winning MLS Cup. Orlando City currently sits in fifth place in the Eastern Conference, but it is not worth looking at the team’s possible playoff paths just yet, with teams having between five and nine regular-season games still remaining. Just know that if the Lions qualify for the playoffs, they will be playing for both the MLS Cup and a spot in next year’s CCC between late October and early December.

Now, for Orlando City to qualify for the playoffs, the Lions are going to need to continue to earn points, and if they are to earn a CCC spot through the final avenue from the list of options above, they are going to need to earn a lot of points in their final six games. It has probably already crossed your mind that a team could actually qualify for the CCC in multiple ways, as was the case, for example, with LAFC last season.

LAFC won the U.S. Open Cup in 2024, was the runner-up in Leagues Cup, and finished third in the Supporters’ Shield rankings. The CCC has a hierarchy for how it allocates the positions when a team earns berths in multiple ways, and it goes like this (for American teams):

• Leagues Cup top three.
• MLS Cup winner.
• MLS Supporters’ Shield winner (a.k.a. the Eastern or Western Conference winner with the most points).
• U.S. Open Cup winner.
• The other MLS Conference winner and the next two top-ranked teams in the Supporters’ Shield rankings.

With this in mind, Orlando City could win MLS Cup or get in via a Supporters’ Shield ranking spot. Currently, the Lions are ninth in that ranking, averaging 1.68 points per match. Here are the top 10 teams in the Supporters’ Shield rankings as they stand today, using points per match (PPM) instead of actual points earned, to account for the fact that teams have not all played the same number of matches.

If Orlando City runs the table — a difficult task given that four of the club’s final six opponents are in the top 10 list above (thankfully, three of those games are at home, with only Cincinnati on the road) — the Lions could get up to a maximum of 1.91 points per match. If every other team were to continue to play at their same pace during their final games, Orlando City would finish third behind Philadelphia and San Diego and earn a Champions Cup spot.

Both of those statements came with pretty large “ifs,” and it is foolish to think that both will occur. I am a mortal, and even though I live near the Haunted Mansion at Magic Kingdom, I am not a foolish mortal, so I do not think the Lions will win all six games. A realistic, best-case scenario would be earning 12-14 points, which would take the team to 1.74-1.79 points per match after the final game.

Speaking of realism (though not the magical realism of one of my favorite books, One Hundred Years of Solitude), it is unrealistic that every other top team will continue to play at the exact same points-per-match pace, but most teams will likely finish their seasons similarly to how they performed during their first 25+ games. Miami’s performance no longer matters, as the Herons are locked into Champions Cup through Leagues Cup, and if Minnesota, Nashville, or Philadelphia can take home the U.S. Open Cup, that clears out another team ahead of the Lions in the Supporters’ Shield table.

The Western Conference is guaranteed one spot via the Supporters’ Shield route, but the other three places are up for grabs among the teams in the table. It is possible that some of the teams right below Columbus could jump up as well, but Seattle is already in by winning Leagues Cup, and the others would need to win every game to jump over so many teams.

If Orlando City can play well during its final games and get up to fifth or sixth in the league standings, the Lions will have a strong chance of picking up a Champions Cup spot, and if results go their way, they could even get one from finishing seventh or eighth, but that is pushing it. It may come down to just a few points, so these next six games are critical not only for playoff seeding, but also to see whether OCSC can compete for a continental championship in 2026.

Of course, the Lions could also continue their year-over-year trend of advancing one round deeper into the MLS Cup playoffs (2022 — eliminated in the conference quarterfinal; 2023 — eliminated in the conference semifinal; and 2024 — eliminated in the conference final) and advance all the way to the MLS Cup championship game, and then win the whole darn thing. This is my preference.

I think continental competitions are really fun. It is cool to see teams from different nations that rarely play each other matching up and vying for a championship. The Orlando Pride, coincidentally, are currently participating in the Concacaf W Champions Cup, and won their opening match on Tuesday at home against a team from Costa Rica. They play their next match in Panama and finish group play with two matches (away and then home) against teams from Mexico.

Hopefully we at The Mane Land will be previewing an Orlando City Champions Cup game in early 2026, as that will mean the club finished strong in the 2025 regular season and/or the MLS Cup playoffs. The Lions will start their final run of games in Washington, D.C., and it would really be a capital idea that they go into Audi Field, smash D.C. United, and bring home all three points.

Vamos Orlando!