After the disappointment of two dropped points against Minnesota on Saturday, Orlando City is back home with an opportunity to get things back on track. The Lions need to keep picking up points if they want to keep pace in an increasingly crowded Eastern Conference, and Saturday’s game is a good chance to start September off on the right note. San Diego FC stands in the way of that good start, and what follows are three things that I believe Orlando needs to do in order to emerge victorious from this game.

Stay Strong on the Left

The left side of the defense has been a question mark for the Lions for much of the year. Adrian Marin, Bernardo Rhein, and Zakaria Taifi have all spent time at left back lately and have done so with varying degrees of success. Regardless of who suits up there on Saturday, that area of the field will be under scrutiny once again, since they’ll be tasked with stopping San Diego right winger Anders Dreyer. He has eight goals and 11 assists in 21 appearances this year, has played 60 key passes during that time, and is generally the lynchpin through which the San Diego offense operates. He hasn’t quite been on the same pace that saw him bag 19 goals and 19 assists in the regular season last year, but with four goal contributions in his last three MLS appearances, he’s extremely capable of wreaking havoc from the wing. A lot of the goals OCSC has conceded lately have come down the left side of the defense, and if that area of the field can’t be taken care of better, the Lions will likely be in for a difficult night.

Do Damage in Transition

Orlando’s current style of positionless, fluid, attacking soccer is at its best when it comes up against teams that want to come out and play. It struggles mightily against defensive bunkers but shines when the Lions can get out and run, target open spaces, and combine with teammates in unexpected areas. Fortunately for OCSC (in theory), San Diego is a team that likes to have the ball, as it has the highest average possession in the league. That means the Lions will have opportunities to force turnovers and break the other way at pace. In order to make that happen though, OCSC will need to be both disciplined and effective when it comes to applying its press. Then, if/when the Lions win the ball, correct decision-making and clinical execution in the final third will be key to avoid letting any chances slip through their fingers (paws?).

Clean Up the Self-Inflicted Errors

Orlando has dealt with more than its fair share of general defensive struggles this year, but avoidable errors have been a particular problem in recent weeks. Whether it’s been an ill-advised challenge, passing to the opposition in the defensive third, or leaving men unmarked in the box, unnecessary mistakes have cost OCSC points time and again. Against lesser opposition it hasn’t always mattered, as the Lions were able to rescue three points against Real Salt Lake, but if Orlando wants to make a playoff push, it needs to make a habit of playing cleaner games, plain and simple. San Diego is a good team with dangerous offensive players, and Saturday’s visitors will very likely take advantage of any opportunities that the Lions gift-wrap for them. Keeping things mistake-free will go a long way.

We’ve got ample proof this season that nothing is guaranteed, but if the Lions can lock down the left side of the defense, make hay in transition moments, and limit unforced errors, then they should be in a good position to take all three points from Saturday’s game. Vamos Orlando!

Three straight days of Orlando soccer starts tonight with Orlando City B’s road match against Inter Miami II at 7 p.m. Hopefully, Orlando’s teams do well over the next few days as crunch time is upon us when it comes to making the playoffs, especially for MLS NEXT Pro. For now though, let’s jump right into today’s links from around the soccer world!

Orlando City Prepares for San Diego FC

Orlando City will take on San Diego FC on Saturday in the first-ever game between the two clubs, and one of the storylines to keep an eye on is how much Martin Ojeda plays as he works his way back from injury. The Designated Player came off the bench late in Orlando’s 3-3 draw against Minnesota United in his first appearance since May 23. Not often injured, Ojeda spoke on how being off the field for over a month has shifted his perspective while training to return.

“You learn to value the moment much more. You learn to value every training session because, when you’re training on your own and you’re not available to your teammates, you feel uncomfortable,” Ojeda said. “You value being healthy more. It’s like everything in life. When you feel good, you live life almost on autopilot, so to speak. You go to work, you go home, you come back, you sleep. However, when you or someone close to you goes through an illness or something like that, you value the moment much more and become more conscious of what you’re experiencing.”

Pride Loan Anna Moorhouse to Manchester City

The Orlando Pride loaned goalkeeper Anna Moorhouse to Manchester City through January of 2027. Moorhouse joined the Pride prior to the 2022 season and helped the club win both the NWSL Championship and Shield in 2024. However, she has struggled this year alongside the rest of the Pride’s defense. Moorhouse hasn’t played in the past two games for the Pride, with Cosette Morche starting in her place. Her current contract with the Pride lasts through the 2027 NWSL season, so we’ll have to wait and see what her future with the club is when the loan ends.

Orlando City’s U.S. Open Cup Journey

Between the World Cup, regular season, and Leagues Cup this summer, it can be easy to forget that Orlando City is still in contention to win this year’s U.S. Open Cup. The Lions are in the semifinals of the tournament after crushing Atlanta United 4-1 in the quarterfinals back on May 19. The Lions won much tighter affairs prior to that win, with Javier Otero coming up with seven saves in a 1-0 win over FC Naples and Zakaria Taifi scoring in stoppage time to beat the New England Revolution 4-3 in the following match. Orlando will be on the road for its semifinal match against the Columbus Crew on Sept. 16, but the offense has received a boost due to the arrivals of Antoine Griezmann and Daryl Dike this summer.

MLS Transfer News Roundup

MLS signings continue to pour in as teams look to improve their squads for the rest of this season and beyond. The Colorado Rapids signed Ghanaian winger Ibrahim Sadiq from AZ Alkmaar, where he recorded 18 goals and seven assists in 85 appearances across three seasons with the Dutch club. San Diego also added an attacker by signing forward Cedric Bakambu, who joins as a free agent after playing at Real Betis. As for other notable moves from across the league, Real Salt Lake signed winger Dusan Zagar as an MLS U22 Initiative player, forward Lyle Foster joined the Houston Dynamo on loan, and the Columbus Crew continued to improve on offense by signing Moroccan winger Anass Zaroury on loan from Panathinaikos.

Free Kicks

• Former Orlando Pride player Christina Burkenroad is retiring from professional soccer and Monterrey will have Saturday’s game against Toluca be a send-off match for her.

• North Carolina Courage forward Ashley Sanchez was named NWSL Player of the Month after recording five goals and two assists in August.
• The Kansas City Current signed Cameroonian defender Maeve Nyadjou, who just helped her nation win the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations for the first time and was named 2026 WAFCON Best Young Player.
• Becky Sauerbrunn is joining the Portland Thorns as a technical consultant for the remainder of the 2026 NWSL season.
• Edin Dzeko announced that he will retire from international soccer following Bosnia and Herzegovina’s UEFA Nations League qualifier against Sweden on Oct. 2. That will be his 152nd match for Bosnia, wrapping up a 19-year-old international career that included 73 goals.

That’s all I have for you this time around. I hope you all have a fantastic Friday and rest of your weekend!

Despite the best attempts by math teachers across the world, including me in the first decade of this century, math is the subject that is most often cited as the one that people disliked the most when they were in school. While I do not enjoy this, I understand it, because math is difficult and only brilliant and sophisticated people like me could ever grasp such complex topics as addition and division.

I may have ever so slightly exaggerated my intelligence level in the previous sentence.

Math is difficult, however, especially because it often requires context in order to be fully understood, and in many cases, the context is as clear as pondwater. This is magnified when it comes to statistics, and why statisticians prefer to talk about confidence levels and ranges instead of providing a specific answer. Sports are chock full of statistics, but without painstaking work to evaluate the context of how those numbers happened, it is hard to truly feel like any particular statistic is a true differentiator among players or teams.

For example, Orlando City has allowed the most goals this season, “leading” the league in both the actual number of goals allowed and also in goals allowed per 90 minutes. There is no dispute about this, but there is also no context with those numbers as to why. The eye test says that the defense has not always looked cohesive on the field, and several starters have missed time due to injuries. The starting lineup in the last two games included Zakaria Taifi as the left back, and he does not have a lot of experience playing this position at the MLS level, or any level, yet.

According to playoffstatus.com the Lions have also played the seventh-hardest schedule in the league, which certainly has not helped with keeping the ball out of the back of the net. At all. Because, as math clearly states, 2.45 goals allowed per 90 minutes = yikes.

On our site and on our PawedCasts we have focused a lot on the back line and its struggles, but it is Maxime Crépeau who is usually the one actually taking the ball out of the net. As with every goal allowed, there is a share of the blame pie that goes to each player, but in general, the heaviest responsibility is borne by the defenders and goalkeeper, so let’s take a look at the Canadian netminder’s performance thus far this season.

The analysts at American Soccer Analysis (ASA) have a goals added model specific to goalkeepers, built on top of six different metrics. At this point in the season, 37 goalkeepers have played at least 500 minutes, and Crépeau’s rank in each category and the overall rankings is shown in the table below.

The models are proprietary, and I am confident that they were designed to try to take as much into account as possible, but as much as it pains me to say as a math person, I think goalkeeping data is very noisy and is much more directional than precise. There are so many dependencies with every cross and shot that is played into the box, and models can try to account for them all but they are never able to do so.

As a case in point, FotMob also its own proprietary goalkeeper metrics, with its leading metric being goals prevented. What this boils down to is the number of actual goals allowed as compared to the amount of expected goals (xG) allowed, which is in and of itself a measure that sounds precise but has its own inherent flaws. Every shot from a particular grid on the field is assigned the same expected goal percentage, no matter the shooter, whether they were using their preferred foot, if they were shooting it with a clean look at goal or under duress, if the shot was true or was deflected, and a host of other aspects that could come into play on a shot.

Over thousands of shots the percentages are likely very close to the xG, but most goalkeepers have faced between 80-120 shots on target this season (Crépeau ranks second, at 135), and with that small of a sample there will be some major variation in the xG calculations. Crépeau ranks 25th in g+ from ASA but 12th in goals prevented on FotMob, so clearly there is something significantly different in its models as it relates to the shots he has faced. Matt Turner, however, is top on both metrics, but take a look at the shot charts from Turner and Crépeau from FotMob below (there is one goal on each side circled in red; sadly I could not remove that from the screenshot), and some of why that is can be explained visually.

Aside from Clark Kent, very few people on Earth can fly (is Clark Kent really a person, though? A question for another site). Turner has not seen any shots on target in the upper right-hand corner of his net thus far this season, whereas Orlando City’s opponents have put a bunch of shots there, in an extremely difficult location for Crépeau to save them. Neither goalkeeper has any control over that, and with such small samples of shots on target, the prevalence of shots to extremely difficult locations against Crépeau compared to Turner plays a large role in the differences in their rankings.

To be fair to Turner, he is an excellent goalkeeper. These illustrations are more about the effects on Crépeau’s rankings than to take away from Turner’s.

Another measure of goalkeeper statistics is save percentages by shots taken from inside and outside the box, which is tracked by Sofascore. This is a truly objective measure — no models or formulas, just the percentage of saves by the location of the shot. The chart below shows the differences in save percentages by each goalkeeper against the league average during the past two seasons (a value in the green quadrant would show a goalkeeper that saved a higher percentage of shots inside the box (x-axis) and outside the box (y-axis) than the league averages of 61% for inside the box and 83% for outside the box).

Both of Orlando City’s starters during the last two seasons were subpar against shots from long range (Crépeau is 10% below average, Gallese was 7% below), but El Pulpo was slightly better than average on shots from inside the box and Crépeau was nearly exactly dead on with the two-season average.

Hang on, though, because just when you thought this was objective, it kind of also is not. Outside the box means anywhere outside of the lines, and Orlando City has allowed nine shots from just on the other side of the line, including six from right in the semicircle at the top of the box. That is an incredibly dangerous location, but it counts as outside the box just the same as a 30-yard long-range attempt, a.k.a., the Luis Muriel Not-so-special.

Crépeau has allowed 10 goals on 38 shots from outside the box, but half of those goals are from 18-20 yards away and in the middle of the field, which is a more dangerous location than many locations inside the box.

Additionally, of those 10 outside -the-box goals only one has happened since the World Cup break. The Canadian was excellent during the World Cup and has been as well for the Lions since the season resumed. Perhaps playing for his country sparked this recent run of strong play, or perhaps he just needed time to settle in with his new team. Either way, Crépeau and Orlando City are only allowing 1.43 goals per game since the season resumed, a massive improvement compared to the 2.93 from the opening months.

It would have been nice if the team had only given up two instead of three at Minnesota, but then again, if not for some incredible plays by Crépeau in the first half, the Lions might have given up four or five, so only allowing three was actually somewhat positive.

And that is always the conundrum for goalkeepers. Giving up three goals was bad! Wait, but it probably should have been worse, so giving up three was good! The analytical models do not take into account that Robin Jansson passed a ball straight to Minnesota to give the Loons a quick counterattack against minimal defenders, or that Taifi was too far inside and double teaming a Loon instead of playing out on the left side where he should have been, allowing a wide-open attack in his area.

The statistics say three goals allowed against Minnesota, with precise physical locations of the shots and associated xG values, but as the ever-brilliant Mark Twain once said, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

The numbers tell some of the story of Crépeau’s performance against Minnesota and of his season so far, but having watched every minute of every game this season, I think the truth of the matter is that he has outperformed expectations and has been an excellent replacement after the departure of club legend Gallese.

And he has done it with only two arms, a statistically significant difference in arms than the eight of El Pulpo. That might be the only goalkeeping statistic that everyone agrees about from this article.

Vamos Orlando!