Orlando City SC are a contender for the first time in their history

After a great offseason, Orlando City have a chance at contending in the Eastern Conference.

Over the last year or so, Orlando City have been an oft-forgotten team in the national American soccer community, even as their rabid fanbase gets them on ESPN every other week. They’ve had their moments (the Cyle Larin saga, the gallons of cash they dropped for Dom Dwyer last summer, Kaka), but as a mediocre Eastern Conference team yet to make the playoffs in their three-year history, they naturally haven’t been a popular discussion topic.

They were a hard team to analyze due to their constant lineup shifting and unknown stop-gaps filling roles all over the field — they have a left-back on the roster who legitimately goes by “PC” and started five games last year. I’d like to think I’m relatively familiar with most MLS players, but I can offer no scouting report of PC. That, in a nutshell, sums up Orlando in 2017.

By the end of the season, the only things many associated with this team were “bad at defending” and “when are they selling Larin?” There wasn’t much to say.

That has changed. Jason Kreis and co., entering their second full season in charge, have rebuilt the roster from the bottom up. They let go of 14 players and so far have acquired 11, an impressively high turnover rate, and they re-did their starting lineup, outsourcing almost all of their allocation funds while securing contributors from across the globe.

Accompanying midseason signings Dom Dwyer and Yoshimar Yotun were Sacha Kljestan and Justin Meram, traded from the Red Bulls and the Crew; 18-year-old Josue Colman in the midfield, Oriol Rosell in the No. 6 role, and Mohamed El-Munir at left-back. (As an aside, the nationalities of these players are as follows: English-turned American, Peruvian, American, Iraqi, Paraguayan, Catalonian and Libyan. Props for a worldwide scouting operation, Orlando).

Questions can be asked of a weak-looking backline, but once they add a center-back starter and some younger depth, OCSC will be immediate top-of-the-table contenders. The “solve everything in one offseason” blueprint, patented by last year’s Chicago Fire and fueled by Targeted Allocation Money, is on display here.

Orlando, suddenly one of the most talented teams in MLS, provide plenty of intrigue with a front six that could fit together a number of different ways. Kreis’s iconic diamond 4-4-2, used to great effect at the turn of the decade with Real Salt Lake and occasionally to lesser effect last season, doesn’t fit their attacking personnel, pushing them more in the direction of the standard 4-2-3-1 or 4-3-3. While those setups can easily become generic, they will allow Orlando a certain unique fluidity.

Kljestan, Meram and Colman are three creative players who can distribute high up the field and prefer to work in the middle, whether from deep, in the traditional “CAM” position or off of the wing. We’ve seen MLS teams with multiple high-volume creators have success in the past — Toronto with Victor Vazquez as a true No. 10 and Sebastian Giovinco as a roaming second striker, as a recent example — but having three through-ball artists and attacking distributors on the field at once is a new and novel idea.

The three could line up in a variety of different ways. Kreis could start Kljestan in the central attacking role he played for so long in New York and surround him with Meram and Colman on either wing. That look, a 4-2-3-1, would push Yotun into deeper midfield as a box-to-box midfielder alongside the No. 6 Rosell. He could also move Kljestan back to the regista role he flourished in years ago, which would allow Yotun to play alongside Colman and Meram on the “3” line.

Should Kreis look to the diamond, he would probably have to play Meram next to Dwyer as a second striker.

Orlando are built to run this formation. Yotun is perfect for the shuttler role, and the depth they’ve kept and acquired in midfield is well-suited to step into a diamond: Will Johnson (a key cog for those Kreis RSL teams), Cam Lindley, Dillon Powers and tradeable defensive midfielder Cristian Higuita are all capable backups.

Meram, though, is less of an obvious fit. He’s played the last four years as winger in a 4-2-3-1 for Gregg Berhalter in Columbus, and the spacing and positional responsibilities would be much different were he to play as a shuttler in Kreis’s diamond, or up top next to Dwyer.

At the same time, Meram would be a worthwhile experiment as a second striker. (This is the good kind of tinkering.) He is arguably MLS’s best inverted winger and most effective secondary creator; he spent much of his time with the Crew slipping inside from the right wing in order to overload the central channel, create from the point of attack and open space for an overlapping right-back.

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These skills and tendencies are not too dissimilar to what would be expected of him as a second striker. It’s just that he would be doing it full-time.

Colman is a wild-card. He’s just 19, and while Orlando made him out to be a No. 10 when they acquired him, there is no guarantee that is what he turns out to be in MLS. Kljestan, who has led the league in assists each of the past two seasons, should be given the opportunity to play as the No. 10, but if they see enough in Colman, they could push Kljestan back next to Rosell and let him distribute from deep.

However they assemble it, their attack will be among the best in the Eastern Conference. Dwyer, now with service he hasn’t seen since Benny Feilhaber was in his prime, seems poised to score a lot more goals than the nine he compiled last year. Rosell (who played for the unofficial Catalonia national team in a 2013 friendly against Cape Verde), will solidify defensive midfield, where an underdeveloped Higuita was a question mark.

OCSC have quietly bolstered the depth behind this promising attack as well. They sent a third-round pick to the Galaxy for Jose Villarreal, signed Homegrown player Pierre da Silva and grabbed the highly-touted Chris Mueller in the first round of the SuperDraft. Villarreal, da Silva and Mueller can play multiple positions across the top of the formation, including second striker.

The Larin drama, which ended with the Canadian happy in Istanbul playing for Beskitas and the Purple Lions collecting $750,000 of allocation money, overshadowed a lot of the good work Orlando have done this offseason. None of it is secured until they find a replacement for Jose Aja in central defense, but they have a chance at rising to the elite Toronto FC chase pack in the Eastern Conference.

One thing is for sure: We’ll be paying a lot more attention to this team in 2018.