Orlando City Still Working to Blend Youth Movement With Veteran Leadership

As you surely know by now, Orlando City did not get the win in its season opener, losing 2-1 to the New York Red Bulls. While it was a disappointing result, it was only one game in a 34-game regular season and the Lions still have plenty of time to climb back up the standings. Speaking of time, in the season opener, Head Coach Óscar Pareja had little choice but to affirmatively answer the age-old question about whether it was the right time to play the kids. Due to injuries and several still unused roster spots, he has a short (in number of players, not in height) roster that is full of kids, so they had to play.

On Saturday night, the Lions played five players (Colin Guske, Iago, Nolan Miller, Zakaria Taifi, and Tiago) who were younger than 21.6 years old, which, according tofbref.com, was the first time they had played five players that young in MLS league play since their inaugural season in 2015. Back in 2015 they did it six times, including one game when they played six players of that age or younger (blast from the past alert, those players were: Harrison Heath, Cyle Larin, Rafael Ramos, Carlos Rivas, Bryan Róchez, and Tyler Turner).

The only other time in club history when so many young players played in one game was during the U.S. Open Cup win over Tampa Bay last season, which featured Gustavo Caraballo, Alex Freeman (sigh), Guske, Nico Rodriguez, and Taifi.

Aside from those early seasons, Orlando City has generally utilized a team that ranks around the middle of MLS in average age as can be seen from the chart below, which shows the season-long weighted average age by minutes played across the entire league since Orlando City joined in 2015:

It is important to note that 2026 is only inclusive of one game, and the number of dots in each column will not perfectly match the total number of teams in the league that season because often there were multiple teams who had the same average age, so the dots are perfectly stacked on top of each other.

The group that played for Orlando City on Saturday had a weighted average age of 26.0, which currently ranks as the youngest season-long average age in the club’s 12 seasons in MLS. The last time I checked, however, Benjamin Button was not on the roster (though the Lions still have those open roster spots), so these players will all be older during each subsequent game this season, continually raising their contributions to the average age. Eduard Atuesta (28.7) and Robin Jansson (34.3) will both also probably play extensive minutes this season when healthy, likely replacing the minutes that were played on Saturday by Guske (19.1) and Iago (20.9).

Guske acquitted himself well, and Iago showed flashes of his potential, so it is not as if neither player will play much again this season, but Pareja, like many coaches, often goes with trusted veterans over young players still proving themselves with his team selections.

On this week’s The Mane Land PawedCast Michael Citro answered one of the best mailbagbox questions in the history of the show (no bias detected) by saying that he thought the next Lion to make their 2026 season debut would be Caraballo, the precocious 17.5 year old winger. Caraballo was not on the bench against the Red Bulls, but he and the other players who made the bench but did not play (Justin Ellis, Javier Otero, Tahir Reid-Brown, Yutaro Tsukada) are all younger, and in the cases of Ellis and Reid-Brown significantly younger, than that 26-year-old average age of the players who took the field against New York. Luis Otávio and Harvey Sarajian also did not make the bench and are both quite young as well, so until Orlando City signs some more players the youth movement will continue to be in full effect, in particular when Pareja goes to his bench.

The correlation between the average age of a team’s minutes played and its regular-season points per match is basically zero, as can be seen in the chart below, from the full seasons of 2018 through 2025. I would have gone back through 2015, but Microsoft Excel has a limitation of 255 pairs when creating a scatterplot. Thanks, Bill Gates. I did the math though, and the scatterplot would look pretty similar, just with more dots that are essentially patternless.

There may not be a strong positive or negative correlation between average age and points per match, but teams that were mostly very young (the extreme left side) tended to not earn a high amount of points per match during a full season. Orlando City’s average age will not be very young this season, especially if the rumors become true and 34-year-old (turning 35 in March) Antoine Griezmann joins the club, but there are enough young talents who will get minutes that it should stay in the 26-27 (unintentional six-seven reference, I apologize) range for most of the season.

Despite the loss in game one, I remain optimistic about Orlando City’s 2026 season. Perhaps that is because it would be hard to have a worse half than the first half of the season opener, so things can only go up, but I think it is more so because this team has talent and the players just need to get more experience playing together. They have a good mix of veterans and young players with Florida bright futures, and now that the season has started and the roster is mostly set, it is time for them to blend into one cohesive unit.

And as they do I believe they can age together like a fine wine, getting better each month as the season builds towards the league’s final ever fall playoffs.

Vamos Orlando!