There are times in life when you can see something happening, or realize something is happening, but can do very little, if anything at all, to stop it from happening. It’s a distinctly demoralizing experience, watching something unfold that you have no power to change, and you can encounter that situation in any number of settings.

As an example, I’d like to tell a story about something that happened to me this spring. I was in Miami visiting some friends and we had taken out a boat for a few hours to swim and relax. After being in the water for a bit, I was at the back of the boat and intended to make my way up to the front to join some people and dry off. My phone was in my hand, and thinking that I wanted to be safe and secure, went to put it into my pocket as I navigated the narrow ledge along the side of the boat that would take me to the front. Unfortunately, the boat shifted as I went to put the phone in my pocket, it got stuck on the edge of said pocket, was knocked out of my hand, bounced off the deck of the boat once, and directly into the water. I watched it happening and knew what was going to happen, but I found myself frozen until it was too late and my phone was lost to a watery grave.

I want you to keep this anecdote in mind as we delve into the slow, torturous end of Orlando City’s 2025 season, as I’ll be relating back to it periodically.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and with the benefit of hindsight there are a number of small events that led to the Lions exiting the playoffs with a whimper in the play-in game, before the postseason ever really began. The prologue came before the season even started, when the decision was made to enter the campaign with no true backup at left back, and very thin/unproven depth at both center back and winger. The club was going to need to rely on new signings and young players to step up to the challenge, while also replicating an oddly healthy 2024 campaign — both of which were risky gambles in isolation, but when paired together became positively perilous. For now though, let’s leave the state of the opening day roster to the side, and fast forward to the month of August.

After matchday 27, Orlando was sitting pretty with seven more league games to go. The Lions were fourth in the Eastern Conference on 47 points — just five points back from FC Cincinnati in first. OCSC was riding a four-game winning streak in the league, a seven-game unbeaten streak in all competitions, and had advanced to the knockout rounds of Leagues Cup. With just six points separating Orlando and the ninth-place Chicago Fire, the margins were thin, but the good guys were in the driver’s seat.

Then came the first in a small line of events that led to this season ending in the manner it did. The club has always valued cup competitions and rightly so. After all, the first piece of silverware the Lions won as an MLS club was the U.S. Open Cup, and Orlando City has usually done well in knockout competitions. So, when the team made the knockout portion of Leagues Cup, it was not surprising to hear Oscar Pareja and some of the players talk about their desire to compete on two fronts and do their best to win a trophy, particularly after reaching the semifinals.

The result was that, after beating Toluca on penalties on Aug. 20, Pareja made the decision to field a heavily rotated team on Aug. 23 on the road against Nashville SC, with the semifinal against Inter Miami on Aug. 27 looming large. The chips were pushed into the middle of the proverbial table, and winning Leagues Cup was prioritized heavily. It was a decision akin to me making up my mind to go to the front of the boat and to put my phone in my pocket as I did so. There was plenty of good reasoning behind it at the time, but it was the beginning of the end.

Consider what happened next: Nashville thrashed Orlando 5-1, the Lions lost the semifinal to Miami 3-1, and then dropped the third-place game 2-1 to the LA Galaxy, missing out on the Concacaf Champions Cup spot that came with it. True, there were some interesting officiating decisions in the Miami game, and missing the suspended David Brekalo hurt Orlando against the Galaxy. It’s also true that heavy cross-country travel undoubtedly played a role in some of the performances at that time, particularly against the Galaxy. OCSC played Sporting Kansas City at home on Aug. 16, flew to LA to play Toluca on Aug. 20, then traveled to play in Nashville on Aug. 23, played away against Miami on Aug. 27, and then flew back across the country to play the Galaxy on Aug. 31.

Now that being said, the club knew that’s what the travel would look like when the decision was made to prioritize Leagues Cup. The organization knew that Toluca had hosting rights and understood the gauntlet the schedule would present if Orlando got by the Mexican side. Long-distance travel is simply a fact of life for an MLS club, and while the team picked up Adrian Marin and Tyrese Spicer as reinforcements, Rafael Santos going the other way meant that the change at fullback was a net zero. Still, the team tried to prepare itself for the packed run-in as best it could — at first.

The next domino to fall was Ramiro Enrique being sold. While it didn’t officially occur until Sept. 8, the Argentine was rumored to be headed out the door in late August and was not in the squad for the third-place game against the Galaxy — presumably because he was waiting for the finishing touches to be put on his paperwork. If the reported numbers are to be believed, then the club made a profit on the striker, and there’s something to be said for selling if the money is right not standing in the way of the player’s wishes.

The other side of the argument is that Enrique had eight goals and two assists when he was sold, and he finished the year fourth on the team in goals behind Martin Ojeda, Marco Pasalic, and Luis Muriel. While Duncan McGuire was finally healthy in late August after undergoing a second surgery, the team needed all the bodies it could get when looking at the schedule, especially bodies that had a knack for scoring important goals like Enrique did.

In the context of my boat story, the Enrique sale equates to me attempting to put my phone in the pocket facing the ocean, rather than the one up against the boat. Understandable to use the oceanside pocket, given that I was using my boat-side hand to hold onto a railing and keep myself steady, but wouldn’t it have been wiser to simply make sure my phone was secure before making my way to the front at all? In the same manner, wouldn’t it have been wiser to outright keep a guy that productive, or at least try to arrange for him to be loaned back until the MLS season ended before joining his new club? Perhaps Al-Kholood refused. We may never know, but we do know that in the seven games after he was sold, Orlando scored more than one goal on only two occasions.

Another domino came in the form of Orlando’s Aug. 30 match against the Vancouver Whitecaps being rescheduled for Oct. 11 because of the Lions playing the Galaxy in the third-place game on Aug. 31. Not only did that mean that new Whitecap Thomas Muller would have additional time to settle into his new surroundings, but it also meant that the game would take place during an international break. While that certainly seemed less than ideal, our next domino meant that when the Vancouver game finally rolled around, the outlook was downright ominous.

Beginning with the Sept. 13 match against D.C. United, Marin and Cesar Araujo were sidelined with injuries. Marin eventually returned against FC Cincinnati on Sept. 28, but in the next game against the Columbus Crew on Oct. 4, Joran Gerbet tore his ACL in the fifth minute, ending his season. That meant that due to injuries and call-ups, Brekalo, Alex Freeman, Pasalic, Spicer, Gerbet, Araujo, Colin Guske, and Gustavo Caraballo were all unavailable for the Vancouver match. Matters then got even worse in that game when Robin Jansson went off injured in the 18th minute. After McGuire entered to replace him, Pareja did not make another sub until the 86th minute, when Zakaria Taifi came on for McGuire. By that point, Orlando had surrendered a one-goal lead, and many players looked dead on their feet.

On one hand, there wasn’t much to work with on the bench. After McGuire entered in the first half, it left Papi with Taifi, Shak Mohammed, Thomas Williams, Favian Loyola, and Titus Sandy Jr. to call on. Still, the decision to ride the clearly exhausted starters as long as he did can and should be questioned. Watching a team get overrun and simply hoping that they can hang on and things work out is not usually a strategy for success. In the same fashion, watching one’s phone plummet to the deck of a boat and bounce overboard while frozen rooted to said deck rather than trying to stop it, all while that boat is out and drifting on Biscayne Bay, is rarely the right move to make, yet that’s precisely where I, and Orlando City both found ourselves.

The Lions, of course, went on to lose that game at the death, and personally it felt like a breaking point to me. If that shorthanded, outgunned team had somehow been able to snatch a result against one of the best in the West, I felt like it could be used as a rallying point entering the playoffs — aside from the fact that the three points would have been invaluable and ultimately have seen the team finish in sixth. Orlando had made a nasty habit of dropping points late in games all year, a point that I hesitate to even call a domino given how ingrained it seemed to be in this team’s DNA. Still, I couldn’t help but feel that if the trend had been bucked at that moment, it could have propelled this team forward in the right direction. Instead, it seemed to break the Lions for good.

What followed was the disastrous Decision Day performance against Toronto FC and the equally calamitous showing against Chicago. Araujo returned as a substitute against Toronto, and he and Jansson were both in the starting lineup against Chicago, but it was too late. On both occasions the Lions simply didn’t look like themselves. In Toronto it was a case of being sloppy and giving away chances, while failing to take advantage of some excellent ones that Orlando created, while in Chicago the team looked like it never got off the plane. Late efforts were made in each game, as Brekalo scored in the 54th minute to make it 3-1 against Toronto, and McGuire bagged a 92nd-minute consolation goal to make it 4-2, while Spicer’s 89th-minute goal in the play-in game made the score 3-1.

Particularly in the Chicago game though, it was damning that the Lions only showed the sort of intensity and fight that was needed from the opening whistle once the game was already out of hand at 3-0 with 20 minutes to go. It felt similar to me grabbing a pair of goggles and diving into the water roughly a minute after my phone had disappeared below the surface into seven feet of water with a strong current and plenty of vegetation present on the bottom — noble enough efforts when examined in isolation but always unlikely to succeed when you have the full context of the situations.

Could this all have been prevented had different choices been made? Perhaps. Maybe if there’s a deeper squad at the beginning of the year, the team is better equipped to handle the brutal travel brought on by Leagues Cup and the subsequent rash of absences for the critical game against Vancouver. Maybe if the Lions didn’t prioritize Leagues Cup so heavily, the Vancouver game wouldn’t have needed to be moved in the first place, and OCSC wouldn’t have come away from its Leagues Cup odyssey with nothing to show for it but an injured, exhausted, misfiring squad. Maybe if I’d held my phone in my hand or left it in my backpack inside the cabin, I’d still have it, and wouldn’t be able to make this flawless, perfect metaphor as a result. We’ll never know.

What we do know is that instead, the injuries, suspensions, and call-ups gradually took their toll, the offense stopped scoring, and game by game the season slowly, agonizingly slipped away in front of our eyes. Just like that, my phone, and Orlando City’s 2025 season were lost to the literal and metaphorical waves.

Because I’m an idiot, my phone wasn’t backed up, and as a result I lost years’ worth of pictures and texts from friends and loved ones. Lots of memories went out the window, and I started over with a new, blank device. As frustrating as that was, it’s especially fitting when it comes to comparing my nautical misadventure in 2025 with Orlando City’s competitive one. The odds are good that this team will look extremely different next year, and while it might not be the completely clean slate that I had, we’ll probably be saying goodbye to a lot of familiar faces from the last couple of seasons, and welcoming some new ones in their stead.

Change is inevitable, and if this club wants to compete and reach the heights that it aspires to, then change is needed. It’ll be sad in some respects, but after watching the way this season slowly, painstakingly failed to fulfill on the promise it held with just seven league games left, it’ll also be welcome. Here’s to new phones, and new (hopefully more successful) seasons.

Vamos Orlando.