Happy Friday, Mane Landers! I made it through the hurricane fairly unscathed over here in Tampa but plan on helping some friends closer to the gulf with yard cleanup. Before we dive into today’s links, let’s all wish a happy birthday to Orlando City/OCB goalkeeper Carlos Mercado!

Reliving Orlando City History With Miguel Gallardo

As part of the series highlighting the people who have had a hand in Orlando City’s history over the past 13 years, the spotlight deservedly landed on Miguel Gallardo. The former Lion spoke on his decision to follow the team to Orlando after the final Austin Aztex season in 2010.

“It was a big decision for me because in Austin I had a business and my family there,” he said. “It was not an easy decision for me, but soccer was always attractive to me, and I felt like I could do better than the way I did in the academy when I was starting out playing in Mexico. Eight of the guys were going to be moving with the team, so I felt like there was a little family there, so after a lot of thought, I decided to come, and it was really special right from the get-go.”

Gallardo was a major part of Orlando’s time in the USL Pro as the team’s goalkeeper and detailed his experience in the 2011 USL Pro championship and in a friendly against Newcastle United. He’s been a part of the Orlando soccer community since retiring as well, climbing the ranks of broadcasting and coaching in the area as well.

New Opportunities Arise for Americans Players

A new United States Men’s National Team head coach in Mauricio Pochettino means plenty of new opportunities for Americans on the fringes of the player pool to get a look. Orlando City forward Duncan McGuire was noted as one such player who deserves some consideration from Pochettino. Although he wasn’t able to take the Olympics by storm this past summer, McGuire has done well at the club level and could give the USMNT another option up top. If Pochettino can elevate McGuire’s game, it would be a boon for the Lions as well.

Young attackers like Diego Luna, Luca Koleosha, and Rokas Pukstas could flourish from Pochettino’s coaching as well. Richie Ledezma, who has been playing at right back for PSV Eindhoven, is also a player to keep an eye on while Sergino Dest recovers from injury.

Kei Kamara Speaks On Importance of U.S. Open Cup

LAFC beat Sporting Kansas City in the U.S. Open Cup final Wednesday night, with striker Kei Kamara helping his team lift the trophy. There’s a great deal of uncertainty for the tournament moving forward, as not every MLS team played in it this year. Following the win, Kamara discussed how the league shouldn’t stop participating in the historic tournament and stated that MLS Commissioner Don Garber “better not take this away.” It’s Kamara’s second time winning the U.S. Open Cup, claiming the title with Kansas City in 2012, and he’s second on the league’s all-time scoring list. It’s great to hear a veteran like Kamara speak so openly about wanting the U.S. Open Cup to stay a part of MLS history.

“We go through the systems of everything that’s happened. They told us to go to school, play soccer in school, go to college, play soccer in college, get drafted, go through the system, and that’s what we’ve done. That’s why I give so much credit to Chris Wondolowski because we’ve done the same things. That’s the American dream that we wanted to do and we made it here so you can’t take away from our history. That’s just my opinion. Don’t take away our history.”

Europa League’s Opening Round Wraps Up

The first round of matches in this year’s revamped Europa League is over and done with and multiple clubs got their campaigns started off on the right foot. Tottenham played a majority of its match against Qarabag a man down, but still managed to win 3-0 at home. Ajax cruised to a 4-0 win against Besiktas, Rangers won 2-0 over Malmo in Sweden, and Lyon beat Olympiacos 2-0 at home. AS Roma had to settle for a 1-1 draw with Athletic Bilbao after conceding in the 85th minute. Eintracht Frankfurt also couldn’t hold onto its lead, allowing two late goals to draw 3-3 at home to Viktoria Plzeň.

Free Kicks

• Former USMNT head coach Gregg Berhalter is reportedly a finalist to become the Chicago Fire’s sporting director, but it could be a hybrid role that has him as head coach as well. FC Dallas interim head coach Peter Luccin is reportedly the frontrunner for the permanent gig, and Bruce Arena is in the mix for the San Jose Earthquakes opening.
• Trinity Rodman will miss the Washington Spirit’s match tonight against Angel City FC due to her back injury. We’ll see if she’s ready to roll when the Spirit visit Orlando to face the Pride on Oct. 6.
• AC Milan is reportedly interested in signing American midfielder Johnny Cardoso from Real Betis.
•  Luis Ruiz was suspended for three months for his violent tackle on Christian Bermudez in Mexico’s second division earlier this month. Bermudez suffered a double fracture in his right leg as a result.
• USL Super League team Fort Lauderdale United FC has rescheduled its upcoming home game due to delays in construction at its stadium.

That’s all I have for you today. I hope you all have a fantastic Friday and rest of your weekend.

Orlando City scored three goals Saturday night against Columbus, marking the seventh time in the last 12 games that the Lions had scored at least three goals in an MLS match. Unfortunately, the team gave up four goals in the loss, leading me to want to spend some time this week looking at the defense again to see if this game was just an aberration, playing against one of the best teams in MLS in their home stadium, or if as the team goes into its final stretch of four games against one elite team (FC Cincinnati) and three teams fighting for their playoff lives (FC Dallas, Philadelphia Union, Atlanta United) there is something still to be ironed out before Lions start their playoff run, assuming they make it.

Let’s start with just some basic numbers, and right away we will see that the performance recently has actually been an improvement from the beginning part of the season, even with four goals against in the most recent match:

This is where it might be fair to bring out the famous saying of “don’t make a mountain out of a molehill,” and point to the fact that the Lions earned shutouts in each of the three games prior to the Columbus match. I will point out that those teams the Lions shut out are ranked 23rd, 27th, and 15th overall in the MLS standings as a counter, but I do concede that one game is the smallest of small samples. So, let’s expand that one-game sample and look at how Orlando City has done against its opponents based on how they rank in MLS in terms of the full league standings (the first two rows are subsets of the third row):

This is not surprising. The teams ranked higher in the full league standings are ranked higher for a reason — specifically that they frequently score more goals than their opponents. It is not a surprise then that Orlando City gives up more goals against those good teams than against teams ranked lower in the standings and also has most of its shutouts against weaker teams as well. However, in the context of whether there is still something to be ironed out, yes, there is something, because once the playoffs start, every team will be good and Orlando City is giving up an average of two goals per game against the top half of MLS.

There is a story behind every goal that a team gives up, so while we have statistics that we can look at around the defense and the goalkeeping, it is never as clear and clean as data from baseball or cricket, for example, when every pitch/bowled ball can be looked at in isolation. That said, Orlando City has given up zero own goals this season, meaning every ball into the Lions’ net came on a shot, and fbref.com has a ton of information about all of those shots that we can look at (note: MLS Avg = the average for every other team except Orlando City; red means a number is worse than league average and green means better than league average):

I had three major takeaways from this data:

1. Either Orlando City’s defense has choked off opposition shots this season against good teams or the better teams are just more judicious with the shots they take, but there is a stark difference in shots allowed per 90 minutes for the games against higher performing teams vs. lower performing teams.
2. Teams towards the top of the standings take fewer shots when they play Orlando City but put a significantly higher percentage of their shots on target when they do get their shots off. Orlando City’s opponents in the Top 10 row above were Inter Miami (twice), Columbus (twice), LAFC, and FC Cincinnati. While those teams each are better than league average in shots on target overall (45.3%, 35.6%, 37.4%, and 37.5% respectively), when they played Orlando City, they looked like Olympic archers, putting everything on target with a 44.4% average.
3. The scariest numbers for me are the percentages of shots on target that turn into goals against good teams. Good teams clearly must have goal scorers, but more than half of the shots that go on target go in? Orlando City has some pretty talented offensive players, and they score a goal on 34% of the shots they put on target. The teams in the Top 5 row above are nearly twice as efficient as that when they play Orlando City, and that is not great, Bob. Or not great, anyone.

Going back to what I wrote earlier, it is exceedingly difficult to place the blame for any goal fairly on a per-player or per-positional-grouping basis. It’s like the butterfly effect. Every action prior has a link in the chain. Perhaps in some future article I’ll use Markov Chains to analyze the chains that lead up to goals to determine their likelihood, and I know all readers will be as enthralled as my high school students were when I taught Markov Chains in Precalculus. They were. I swear.

I think a common reaction for a lot of people when they see those percentages in red above is to think wow, Pedro Gallese must be having a rough season, since such a high percentage of shots on goal become goals. I do think that Gallese is not having an elite season, but it is completely fair to point out that he has had little to no chance on a large percentage of the goals he has given up. As our Mane Land PawedCast hosts Michael Citro and Dave Rohe often say, “¿Por que no los dos?”, as it very much can be on Pedro and on the defense for allowing point-blank shots.

Looking at the four goals from Saturday, as I did in the Five Takeaways and Sean Rollins did in the Player Grades, it is hard to blame Gallese for any of the four goals Columbus scored. Two of the goals were from absolute point-blank range with no defenders between the scorer and the goal, one took a deflection, and the other was smoked into the lower corner.

PSxG, not to be confused with PSG, which used to be everyone’s other favorite team when Messi, Neymar, and Kylian Mbappé were there, stands for post-shot e(X)pected goals and is a measure that includes the location of the shot as well as how well the ball was struck to create a percentage chance that a shot will become a goal. I like this stat, because it includes an independent evaluation of how well the player shot the ball, which makes me more confident in this metric as opposed to plain expected goals (xG), which just uses the location of the shot, no matter how well the ball was hit.

The four goals against Columbus were, in order of when they happened in the game: 0.70, 0.98, 0.61, and 0.78 for their PSxG value. You’ll remember from math class that 0.70 is the same as 70%, and so all four goals from Columbus were on shots where Gallese was at best 39% likely to have made the save on the shot. That is not to say that El Pulpo could not have made the save, as he has made saves on even more difficult shots the past, but unlike in The Hunger Games, the odds were forever not in his favor on those four shots on Saturday.

Gallese has not had a great year in terms of making those elite saves, or really saves in general. During the last three seasons (2022, 2023, and 2024 YTD) there have been 119 goalkeeper seasons of at at least 500 minutes (i.e. Gallese’s 2022, 2023, and 2024 seasons are three of the 119). His 2024 season save percentage of 64.5% ranks 96th of 119 seasons and 29th in MLS this season, and his 2024 (stay with me here) PSxG-GA90 (fancy acronym for post-shot eXpected goals minus goals allowed per 90 minutes — the more positive the number, the better the goalkeeper is doing at saving shots that were expected to be goals) is -0.08, which ranks 79th of 119 seasons and 30th in MLS this season and indicates that Gallese is actually not saving as many shots as “expected” by the analysts from Opta who track the shots.

Those stats do not flatter Gallese, but how many of those shots could he really have saved or should he have saved? There is not yet a clear stat for that yet. PSxG is probably the closest to that, but it is still pretty subjective as it is a human who evaluates how well a shot was struck and the likelihood of it going into the net. Save percentage is not subjective, but no analyst would use that measure as a definitive characterization of a goalkeeper’s worth. The eye test is by definition subjective, and goalkeepers also do a lot more than just saving shots anyway. I still believe Orlando City has a strong goalkeeper, and even if he is not performing near the top of the MLS statistical charts, I do not think by any means that Gallese is the primary reason for the struggles against the better teams.

I believe the unsatisfactory answer for whether something needs to be ironed out is “yes, but something is actually a lot of things.” Orlando City’s best win all season, in terms of beating a team ranked high in the MLS standings, is the recent win against Charlotte FC, which is 15th best in MLS. In their seven matches against teams rated 14th or better, the Lions have taken two points from a possible 21, and have been outscored 20-7. When they play good teams, the defense needs to tighten up, and the offense needs to score more than one goal per game, or else all of a sudden it is going to be the off-season. The next test against a top team will be at FC Cincinnati on Oct. 5 and then in the playoffs, though the Lions still need to earn some points to ensure that they qualify.

Providing the Lions qualify, Orlando City will have to defeat top teams to advance and compete for MLS Cup. As with any playoff system, all that really matters is that you qualify, and then how you did in the regular season does not matter, and the best team on the day advances. Orlando City has not shown thus far this season that it can beat an elite team, but it has shown that it can play well for stretches. The Lions tied the best team in the league and kept it close against the teams ranked second and third.

The old saying is that defense wins championships. Let’s hope the Lions can make some adjustments and defend against the top teams the way they have against everyone else.

For much of the season, Orlando City has only had two legitimate strikers available. It was either Duncan McGuire or Ramiro Enrique, depending on availability and who had the hot foot. In the last few matches, Luis Muriel has come on strong, including scoring a brace against the Columbus Crew.

So, which striker should get the start up top against FC Dallas on Saturday?

Duncan McGuire

McGuire got the last start against Columbus and was held in check during his time on the pitch. He only managed 12 touches and one off-target shot. It wasn’t a great night from McGuire, but to be fair, he wasn’t the only one having trouble in the first half, and he had scored in his previous two matches.

FC Dallas is not the Columbus Crew, though the team does have some height on the back line. Having a big guy like McGuire able to go toe to toe with Sebastien Ibeagha, Omar Gonzalez, and Marco Farfan would be helpful. McGuire does have a nose for goal, and he won’t get pushed around inside the box.

Ramiro Enrique

Enrique came off the bench for McGuire against the Crew, and he started the comeback attempt for the Lions. His strike was a poacher’s goal, but they all count the same. He put himself in the right position to get that goal, which is definitely one of his skills as a striker. He’s a bit sneaky inside the box, allowing him to get goals like that.

The issue with Enrique is his size. He can certainly get knocked off the ball and has almost no chance of winning a header against Dallas’ back line. That being said, he has improved greatly, and did not play as many minutes as McGuire did in the previous match.

Luis Muriel

For most of the season, Orlando City supporters wondered if the front office made a mistake bringing in Muriel. It can take time for players outside of MLS to get a feel for the league. Sometimes it takes way longer than we hope. I had just about given up on Muriel, if I’m being honest, but it seems to have finally clicked for him in the last few matches.

Muriel earned a brace against the Crew, and he really should get an assist on Enrique’s goal. The Colombian set up McGuire’s goal to seal the Charlotte game. He has looked good coming off the bench the last few matches. Has his production earned him a start against Dallas? The one issue I have is that he’s more comfortable playing a little further back. If so, does he occupy the same space as Martin Ojeda or Facundo Torres? Of course, Oscar Pareja does like the hot foot, and that foot currently belongs to Muriel.

Ultimately, I would give Duncan the start, with the hope he’s able to use his size better in the box against Dallas’ defenders. I want to know what you think, so please vote in the poll below, and let me know your reasons in the comments section.