Orlando City: 2020 Preview – Struggles to continue?

With less than a month to go until the start of the 2020 MLS campaign, we are taking a look at how each team has evolved since last year and their chances this term. This time, we look at Orlando City.

Orlando City have now been in Major League Soccer for five seasons having made their debut in the top flight in 2015. But they are still yet to reach the MLS Cup playoffs in that time. In their first season in the league, Orlando finished in seventh in the East, just outside the playoffs. They have not bettered that mark since, and in 2019, the club came home in 11th in the East and 22nd overall for the second season in a row.

They managed to accumulate just 37 points from their 34 regular-season matches, but the Florida side did have some success in the U.S. Open Cup as they made it all the way through to the semi-finals. They lost out to the eventual winners of the competition, Atlanta United, in the semis, but it was a rare positive for an otherwise forgetful campaign.

Here is how Orlando City shape up ahead of the 2020 season.

Best Performers

Unsurprisingly after another poor season, only a single player made it over the 7/10 threshold for their WhoScored average rating in the 2019 campaign. You can probably guess who it was.

Of course, Portuguese star Nani took the top spot in the Lions’ best XI. The winger averaged a 7.29 rating over the course of the season thanks to having a hand in 22 goals, scoring 12 and assisting ten more.

Tesho Akindele and Will Johnson were the only other two players to average more than 6.8/10 across the campaign, with none of their five defenders to make the best XI reaching the 6.8 mark.