Orlando City Will Probably Look South To Replace Luis Muriel

Orlando City kicked off (see what I did there?) its preseason Monday, but Luis Muriel was not in attendance, as he has almost certainly played his final game for the club and will be with a new team in 2026. Muriel did not reach the levels that many fans had hoped he would during his time with the Lions, but he was a solid player for the team and there is no ready-made like-for-like replacement for him on the current roster. His are important shoes to fill, but if he’s out, the club will have an available Designated Player slot, which means the Lions have carte blanche to fill that roster spot however they would like.

Carte blanche is a French phrase meaning “blank check.” Listeners of The Mane Land PawedCast and subscribers to our weekly newsletter will know that our Michael Citro would like the club to use that French phrase to sign a certain French forward named Antoine Griezmann. Bringing his je ne sais quoi to Inter&Co Stadium would enable the Lions to enact a coup d’état on Inter Miami and win the 2026 MLS Cup, which would obviously be a fait accompli were Griezmann to be le prince qui…sorry, the prince that was promised and sign with the Lions.

Griezmann has expressed interest in MLS, and according to transfermarkt.com his market value has dropped from its high of $175 million in 2018 to approximately $12.8 million today, but I do not believe he wants to come to MLS right now, and right now is when Orlando City is looking for a third Designated Player to join with the lethal lefties Marco Pašalić and Martín Ojeda.

Muriel’s departure would leave approximately 2,500 minutes to fill, but it is not yet exactly clear what the front office will be looking for to replace those minutes, as though he primarily played up top, Muriel was not a traditional striker, often dropping deep into the midfield to help initiate offense. After several years of primarily playing a 4-2-3-1, Orlando City played a 4-4-2 for most of 2026, but when Muriel was on the field he played more like a trequartista, roaming all over the field and trying to create goal-scoring opportunities. He finished 2025 with 22 goal contributions in all competitions, so he was decently effective, at nearly one goal contribution (0.88) per 90 minutes — second on the team behind Ojeda.

Muriel’s offense will need to be replaced, but the who, when, and where questions still are unanswered as to how the club will do that. Let’s review the club’s last 10 Designated Player signings, looking at their stats from the season immediately preceding joining Orlando City to see how they filled those spots recently (the table below is from Opta’s tracking on fbref.com across all competitions, and as a reminder, Opta only allocates assists to the player who made the final pass to the goal scorer):

• *These players came from European clubs during the middle of their season, so they are minutes played through half of a full season.
• **In order to get a season-long average for minutes played, I doubled the totals from the players who came from Europe, and kept the others as they were.

Taking a look at that list of players and their performances during the season before they arrived in Orlando, we see that while the average age ends up at nearly 26, that is because the club signed four young (ages 18-23) players, two peak age players (24-29) and four older players (30+). Unsurprisingly, these players were logging a lot of minutes at their clubs and, aside from Colmán, they were contributing goals at a decent rate. At just 18 years old, Colmán is an age outlier on this list, and removing his stats lifts the average goals + assists per 90 minutes to 0.51.

Is Orlando City going to look for an attacking player who is 26 years old, on pace to play (or played, if he was in a league with a calendar like MLS) around 2,600 minutes, and contributes a goal every other game?

Probably not, because as both Orlando City and the overall caliber of play in MLS have improved in recent years, the club will want to target higher performing players with its valuable Designated Player slots. The rumor mill has been heavy around Richarlison (28 years old, plays in England, 0.47 G+A/90) and Robert Lewandoski (36 years old, plays in Spain, 0.89 G+A/90), and while those two and the aforementioned Griezmann (34 years old, plays in Spain, 0.76 G+A/90) definitely would all be the club’s biggest signing since Nani in terms of name recognition, there are also questions about if the Lions want to sign a left wing, attacking midfielder, or striker, and do they want someone who wants to be here for a few years (like Pereyra) or someone who wants to use MLS as a stepping stone in their career (like Torres)?

Either way, the expectations in Orlando have been raised during the Óscar Pareja era, and with the club clearly leaning into the South American pipeline more and more and with those raised expectations, I expect the club to look for a player from South America who is playing a lot of minutes at a club in one of the world’s top 25 leagues (using Opta’s world rankings), who is contributing goals at a rate of around two-thirds of a goal per 90 minutes (sorry Richarlison, though in league play he is at 0.70, so we could just look the other way on those other competitions), and is in the age range of 23-31, allowing for the potential for the player to be sold on in the future.

There are some great players who hit all of those benchmarks (including one Martín “don’t confuse me with Braian, I’m the offensive” Ojeda), and while players like Colombia’s/Bayern Munich’s Luis Díaz and Brazil’s/Real Madrid’s Vinicius Júnior likely have little to no interest in MLS at this point in their careers, fbref.com’s database spit out 38 players who qualify under the above parameters I set out.

Let’s remove the players already in MLS, since they likely are not going to switch teams at this point of the season, and also the following players who are either far too expensive (more than $20 million, according to transfermarkt’s estimated value) or already succeeding far too well in elite leagues: Díaz, Vini Jr., Julián Álvarez (Atlético Madrid), Antony (Real Betis), old friend Cucho Hernández (Real Betis), Kaio Jorge (Cruzeiro), José Manuel López (Palmeiras), Lautaro Martínez (Inter Milan), Pedro (Flamengo), Luis Javier Suárez (Sporting Lisbon), Igor Thiago (Brentford), and Rodrigo Zalazar (Braga).

Once we take all of those out, we are left with a list that contains 21 players, at whom I believe the club will take a long look for the soon-to-be-open Designated Player slot (the list shows the player, his nationality, Transfermarkt’s estimated market value, and where he is currently playing):

• Giorgian De Arrascaeta, Uruguay, $17.6 million, Flamengo (Brazil Série A)
• Mauricio, Brazil, $14 million, Palmeiras (Brazil Série A)
• Marcelino Núñez, Chile, $10.5 million, Ipswich (England Championship)
• Ángel Correa, Argentina, $10.5 million, Tigres (Mexico Liga MX)
• Clayton, Brazil, $9.4 million, Rio Ave (Portugal Primeira Liga)
• Talisca, Brazil, $9.4 million, Fenerbahçe (Turkey Süper Lig)
• Brian Rodríguez, Uruguay, $7.6 million, América (Mexico Liga MX)
• Juan Brunetta, Argentina, $7.6 million, Tigres (Mexico Liga MX)
• Miguel Merentiel, Uruguay, $7 million, Boca Juniors (Argentina Liga Profesional)
• Diber Cambindo, Colombia, $6.4 million, León (Mexico Liga MX)
• Nicolás Castro, Argentina, $6.4 million, Toluca (Mexico Liga MX)
• André Luiz, Brazil, $4.7 million, Rio Ave (Portugal Primeira Liga)
• Oscar Estupiñan, Colombia, $4.4 million, FC Juárez (Mexico Liga MX)
• Rafael Elias, Brazil, $3.7 million, Kyoto Sanga (Japan J1 League)
• Rafael Ratão, Brazil, $3.5 million, Cerezo Osaka (Japan J1 League)
• Léo Ceará, Brazil, $2.9 million, Kashima Antlers (Japan J1 League)
• Jesús Ramírez, Venezuala, $2.3 million, Nacional (Portugal Primeira Liga)
• Emiliano Gómez, Uruguay, $2.3 million, Puebla (Mexico Liga MX)
• Lucas Fernandes, Brazil, $1.4 million, Cerezo Osaka (Japan J1 League)
• Alfonso Trezza, Uruguay, $1.2 million, Arouca (Portugal Primeira Liga)
• Jay-Roy Grot, Suriname, $900,000, Odense (Denmark Superliga)
• Maurides, Brazil, $500,000, Radomiak Radom (Poland Ekstraklasa)

I will not pretend to be an expert on these players, but this is the list of those who qualified under the parameters I outlined earlier, which means they are in the prime of their careers and good goal-contributing form, and therefore should be of interest to the Orlando City front office, especially if any of them are looking for new opportunities in a different league.

I am sure the club will consider an even wider swath of players, including those like Richarlison, who just missed out via my hypothetical parameters, or players like Brazil’s/Arsenal’s Gabriel Jesus, who was injured all of last season, so he did not have any data to evaluate. Orlando City also found success by dipping into the European market with Nani and Pašalić, and so the Lions will certainly not exclude Europeans from their search — or players from any continent for that matter. And while Orlando has never spent a huge amount on a player, maybe the Wilf family really will get out that blank check and go above $20 million, which opens up the landscape for more top-level players to acquire.

In the coming days, we will surely hear about what type of player the club wants with that third spot, and see if that profile falls into the range that I found from who the team has signed recently, or if Ricardo Moreira goes in a different direction entirely. I am looking forward to seeing who comes in and joins the club, because if Orlando can acquire another high-level producer and a finally healthy Duncan McGuire returns to his form from his first two seasons, the team record of 63 goals scored during the 2025 regular season might no longer be the team record after 2026.

If so, then I think that the Eastern Conference final will be sending a répondez s’il-vous-plaît (you might be more familiar with the acronym RSVP) to the Lions this year.

Vamos Orlando!