Happy Friday! A long weekend is ahead of us and there is plenty of Orlando soccer to enjoy as well. I’ll be celebrating my nephew’s first birthday this weekend, so it should be a nice next couple of days visiting family. Let’s dive right into today’s links from around the soccer world!

OCB Match Moved to Sunday in Kissimmee

As a heads up, Orlando City B is no longer playing today. OCB’s match against Atlanta United 2 was originally scheduled for tonight in Atlanta, but it was instead postponed to 7 p.m. Sunday and relocated to Osceola Heritage Park rather than Fifth Third Stadium in Georgia. Stadium availability was cited as the reason for the change, and the match will be played behind closed doors, although it will still be streamed live. The Young Lions are coming off of a 3-0 win over Inter Miami II and will face an Atlanta team that has drawn its last four games.

Alex Freeman Makes USMNT Training Camp Roster

Orlando City right back Alex Freeman was named to the United States Men’s National Team’s training camp roster ahead of friendlies next month against Turkey and Switzerland. The 20-year-old is one of five uncapped players on the roster and one of 16 MLS players. He’ll likely be behind Sergino Dest on the depth chart, but Joe Scally was not called up for this window. There are many notable players absent, opening the door for players like Freeman across multiple positions to stake their claim to participate in this summer’s Gold Cup and the World Cup next year.

FanDuel Sports Network Will Stream Select Pride Games

The Orlando Pride will have eight of its remaining games streamed on FanDuel Sports Network, including tonight’s road game against the Utah Royals. The regional network, which used to be called Bally Sports before rebranding, is available on various providers throughout Florida and there is an app for streaming as well. Personally, I find this as just another cog in a messy machine of NWSL coverage options, but I imagine this is handy for those out there who are already accustomed to using the network to watch other Floridian pro sports teams.

Winter Garden Lands USL League One Team

Another pro soccer team is coming to Central Florida, as the United Soccer League announced its intent to bring a USL League One team to the area. Central Florida Pro Soccer’s ownership group has plans for a development in Winter Garden that would include a 5,000-seat multi-purpose soccer stadium. The plans also include recreational fields, a hotel, parks, and a walking trail. The group will gather input from the community in the coming months to help determine the team’s colors, badge, and name.

Free Kicks

• Kansas City Current defender Alana Cook was placed on the season-ending injury list due to a torn ACL, MCL, and meniscus sustained in the club’s match against the Orlando Pride.
• NJ/NY Gotham FC and Tigres will square off in the Concacaf W Champions Cup final on Saturday. The winner will earn a spot in the 2026 Women’s Champions Cup and the 2028 Women’s Club World Cup.
• Luka Modric penned a farewell to Real Madrid fans as his time with the club has come to an end. I don’t know where his next stop will be, but I sure hope it’s not with a team the Lions still have to face this year.

• Raphina signed a contract extension with Barcelona that will keep him at the club until 2028. The 28-year-old recorded 34 goals and 25 assists in 56 appearances during this breakout year with Barcelona.
• Here’s a nice breakdown of what to watch for in Saturday’s Women’s Champions League final between Arsenal and Barcelona.

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

If you could all hop in the Wayback Machine with me, I would like to take you all the way back to Sunday, May 18, 2025. It was a glorious day, punctuated by a 3-0 victory over Orlando City’s southern rivals Inter Miami. The Five Takeaways article about that game was pretty awesome too, and in that article, the dashingly handsome and spellbindingly brilliant author noted that Orlando City “could, and probably should, have scored five or even six goals” against Miami.

You probably surmised that the author of that Five Takeaways article was me, and I appreciate your immediate recognition of my handsomeness and brilliance. I am also pretty confident that you believe that Orlando City should have scored more than three goals as well, and I am here to tell you that the eye test and the tracking data agree. The wonderful site fotmob.com tracks a statistic coded by analysts from Opta called “big chances,” which they define on their frequently asked questions page as:

A situation where a player should reasonably be expected to score, usually in a one on one scenario or from very close range when the ball has a clear path to goal and there is low to moderate pressure on the shooter. Penalties are always considered big chances.

The key words in their definition are “reasonably be expected,” and so, while the word ‘expected’ is in this definition, do not confuse “reasonably be expected” with “expected goals” (xG). I think of expected goals more like a geography problem, kind of like the game show Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Was that an excuse just to mention that one of my best friends was a contestant on that show in 1994 and won a trip to Orlando? A gentleman never tells.

Back to the geography problem, expected goals is really just a mapping exercise, mapping conversion percentages to locations all over a soccer field and then summing up all the shots taken from those locations in a game. By that measure, fbref.com had Orlando City with an xG of 2.9 against Miami, extremely close to the actual output of three goals. Earlier in the season, however, the xG tracking was 1.6 against Toronto…but the Lions scored four goals.

There are countless examples of the real results not matching the xG. While I value xG and just finished reading a great book called How To Win The Premier League: The Inside Story of Football (soccer)’s Data Revolution, which details the history of expected goals and how the author — the former director of research at Liverpool — helped build the first analytics department at a Premier League club using xG as a foundational measurement tool, I still think xG needs to be used alongside other measures and cannot stand alone by itself.

One of the main reasons I think it needs to be combined with other data is that xG requires a shot to be taken, and sometimes that does not happen. Consider Orlando City’s third goal against Miami, if Duncan McGuire’s cross had gone untouched then the xG on that play would have gone from 0.56 to 0.0, because without a shot attempt there is no shot location, and no map coordinates to use to find the xG for that area of the field.

This takes us back to that definition of big chances, which notably does not include a requirement for a shot to be taken. Duncan McGuire’s pass clearly created a chance to score, and that pass, combined with the perfectly timed run from Dagur Dan Thórhallsson, meant that Orlando City had a great opportunity to score from a location where anyone with eyes would think that “a player should reasonably be expected to score.” If Thórhallsson had whiffed, then the xG would have said no sir, you get 0.0 xG, even though everyone who watched that pass would have said, “Oh my, he should have scored that, what a big chance missed.”

Note: Thórhallsson did not miss, and it was glorious.

According to Opta’s tracking, Orlando City had eight big chances in the game against Miami. Which sounds closer to your memory of that match: Orlando City’s xG was 2.9 or Orlando City created eight big chances to score? I think most people probably think of the latter and remember the breakaways and the close-range opportunities and how it seemed like Orlando City had so many clear chances to score.

Looking at the 2025 season to date, the Lions are tied for the MLS lead with 50 big chances thus far, and just as against Miami, you can see that their conversion rate on those big chances has not been great:

• *The MLS Average is the average of every team except Orlando City

If you were wondering, yes, 28% is among the league’s worst conversion rates on big chances. It is tied for second worst, ahead of only Austin, which must be driving its fans up the wall with a 19% conversion rate on 31 big chances. Maybe the release of Wicked at the end of 2024 put the kibosh on good things happening to those in green for a while. Vancouver, on the other hand, is out there Burning Blue like Mariah the Scientist (contemporary pop song alert), converting a league-leading 53% of its big chances.

For Orlando City, however, 28% feels right. It feels terrible, but it also feels right. How many times did it seem like it would be harder not to score than to score, but then the Lions went ahead and did not score? Luis Muriel leads the team with 12 big chances missed (second most in MLS), and while it takes an extreme amount of skill and work to get into position to miss chances, the reality is that 12 times independent analysts thought Muriel should reasonably have been expected to score and he did not.

Anytime there is a lower-than-average performance there is always a question of whether that performance is reality or if there is a regression to the mean coming. In this case, regression to the mean would actually be positive, or something more akin to ascension to the mean. If Orlando City performs at a conversion rate similar to that of the rest of the league, the Lions will score about one additional goal per every 10 big chances, or an additional five goals over their next 50 big chances generated.

Considering that the Lions generated those 50 big chances in 14 games, it is easy math to double that and put Orlando City at 100 big chances after 28 games at the current pace. That extra five goals, were it to happen and the team continued to similarly convert its “small chances,” would net the team 32 goals in the next 14 games, and take the team to 59 after 28 games, with six more games still to play in the season.

Readers of UpRoar, the weekly newsletter for The Mane Land’s Buy Me a Coffee subscribers, which you can subscribe to by clicking this link, will know that Orlando City’s offense is already on pace to break the club’s MLS goal-scoring record, which is…wait for it…59 goals, and so, if the Lions could start converting more of their big chances, then the 2025 team could not only break that record but smash it — like, epically smash it like the Super Smash Brothers.

And speaking of…what better way to celebrate today’s official opening of Epic Universe but to imagine Óscar Pareja and the coaching staff out there training their goal-scoring dragons and super Marco and Luis-gi to tame the dark world of opposition defenses with their Harry Potter-esque offensive wizardry?

That would be epic, and if you are asking me what the coaching staff should do, that is what I pick.

Orlando City came into the U.S. Open Cup Round of 16 match against Nashville SC riding a 12-match unbeaten streak, including a 3-0 thrashing of in-state rival Inter Miami on Sunday. The Lions’ next match against the Portland Timbers looms on Saturday. Despite the glut of matches, Orlando fielded most of the normal starters in an effort to advance. Unfortunately, the Lions fell 3-2 to the visitors to end any hopes of another Open Cup trophy. Here are my five takeaways from a disappointing midweek match.

Pasalic Power

Marco Pasalic decided he wanted to do it all himself on the first goal. As he has so often, he went up the right side before cutting in to the left and burying an absolute rocket of a shot into the back of the net to give Orlando City the early lead. It’s the type of goal we’ve come to expect from Pasalic since his arrival and it was his first U.S. Open Cup goal on his debut in the competition. Unfortunately, he’ll have to wait until at least next year for his next USOC match.

Tired Starters

One could see that the Orlando City defenders were running on tired legs. It seemed obvious in the two goals given up in the first half. The first goal bounced around in the box and then off of Rodrigo Schlegel for an own goal. On the second goal, no one stepped to Ahmed Qasem at the top of the box, allowing him to put an easy shot into the bottom right corner of the goal.

Alex Freeman was near Qasem, but had to anticipate a pass to the wing. Cesar Araujo trailed Qasem passively, and he was not in position to do anything when the Nashville attacker opted to take the space the defense gave him. On the left side, Nashville’s attackers torched David Brekalo from the start. The defense simply looked tired, including Araujo in central midfield.

Enrique’s Equalizer

Orlando City came back out after halftime looking much better on the ball. The tactical adjustments worked as the team pushed for an equalizer. Working along the right side of the attack, Freeman sent the ball to Pasalic, who smartly provided a one-touch pass to Ramiro Enrique for the finish. It was a well-worked attack and a beautiful finish.

Handball Debacle

In the 72nd minute, there was a handball in the box on Nashville’s Wyatt Meyer. Unfortunately, referee Joshua Encarnacion did not make the call. To make matters worse, he then gave Freeman a yellow card for dissent a little further down the field seconds later. There is no video review in the U.S. Open Cup, so there was no second look available to make the correct call. It was a double whammy of a situation. To then pour salt on the wound, Meyer scored Nashville’s third goal to give the visitors the lead again.

Taking it Too Seriously?

Oscar Pareja takes the U.S. Open Cup seriously. So seriously that he started most of the regulars despite the emotional and physical toll taken in the match against Inter Miami and the volume of minutes they’ve played throughout May every three days. Initially, it looked to be the right decision, but the two first-half goals by Nashville put that into question. The number of minutes played by some of the starters — who will need to play against the Portland Timbers this weekend — may turn one loss into two. That being said, I wanted Pareja to prioritize the Open Cup over the Leagues Cup, and we’ll find out in July and August if that’s the case.

Those are my takeaways from Orlando City’s 3-2 loss to Nashville in the U.S. Open Cup. It was a disappointing result on a night where Nashville didn’t bring their A-squad, but did bring its A-game.

Let us know your thoughts about the Nashville SC match in the comments below. Vamos Orlando!