Adding Nani won’t help Orlando City keep up with growing MLS

With the addition of the veteran Portuguese winger Nani, Orlando City have four designated players, but still lack any hope of making the playoffs.

Nani joins Orlando City on a free transfer from Sporting CP, where he produced nine goals and seven assists in 28 appearances this season.

Having played in England, Spain, Italy, Turkey and Portugal, Nani has played at a high enough level to suggest he should produce in MLS as well. That still doesn’t mean he will help propel Orlando to the playoffs. The 2019 off season has been an inverse to the 2018 off season.

After finishing 10th in 2017 with just 39 points from 34 games, Orlando decided to switch things up and change the roster.

2018 was a massive overhaul year for Orlando City, which included the addition of 16 first team players, including three DPs: 20-year-old Josue Colman, and USMNT players Sacha Kljestan and Dom Dwyer.

All that money and restructuring failed, as it does for most teams. In 2018, Orlando finished in last place in the Eastern Conference, with 28 points from 34 games — only San Jose had fewer.

Orlando City offloaded 14 first team players that had joined at some point in the last two years, most from the 2018 offseason.

Beside USL and Superdraft additions, Orlando added seven players. Alongside Nani, Danilo Acosta, Joao Moutinho, Ruan, Alex De John, Tesho Akindele and Carlos Ascues will join the Lions.

Five of those are defenders — two center-backs (De John and Ascues), one right-back (Ruan) and two left-backs (Acosta and Moutinho).

Akindele is a destined to play backup to Dom Dwyer, which means Nani is ostensibly the only attacking piece to try to improve on the paltry 43 goals scored last season (second worst in MLS).

If you thought the attacking output was bad, the defense conceded a league-high 74 goals last year. Only Lamine Sane and Shane O’Neill remain from last year.

Sane has plenty of high-level experience, having played in Germany at Werder Bremen most recently. O’Neill was a previous Rapids academy product, who left for Europe in 2015 but never found enough time to break into his Dutch club, Excelsior Rotterdam.

This could be a reason to be optimistic, keeping the two most experienced defenders and making some acquisitions. However,  the incoming players’ CVs don’t compare favorably to additions from previous years.

Acosta and Moutinho are young and have room to grow. But both were also offloaded by teams that don’t have a lot of depth or talent at left-back.

Real Salt Lake preferred Aaron Herrera while LAFC swapped Moutinho for Mohamed El-Munir, one of the defenders that leaked 74 goals last year in Orlando.

There is decent competition here, at least. The two are better defensively than El-Munir, who fancied himself a winger more than defender, and both have plenty of upside. There’s still time to tell if Moutinho is shuffled to defensive midfield, where he played in college, or left-sided center-back, which he played on occasion at LAFC.

The rest are unknown in MLS. De John, Ascues and Ruan haven’t proven themselves yet. Ascues has the best history, but that isn’t to say he will improve this league worst defense.

Ruan, the right-back, played in the Brazilian second division, Serie B. Last year he started just 15 matches for AA Ponte Preta.

De John, a New Jersey native, was relegated last year from the Swedish Allsvensken with Dalkurd FF, also starting just 15 games.

Ascues, joining from Club Alianza Lima, is perhaps the most promising addition. He has 10 caps for Peru, and has experience playing in the Peruvian first division.

But they can’t concede 74 again, right? It probably will get better, but this is still a bottom half defense.

Yoshimar Yotun, arguably Orlando’s best player last season and one of the best center midfielders in the league, departed, and there hasn’t been a player who appears to fill that void, either. Cristian Higuita and Ori Rossell remain the only experienced players that can play center midfield in a double pivot.

On top of that Orlando now has four DPs — one more than the league maximum of three — two of which play the same position.

Kljestan and Colman are both central attacking midfielders on opposite ends of the age spectrum — 33 and 20, respectively — and neither were stellar in 2018. Kljestan produced six goals and six assists in 30 appearances while Colman had one goal and five assists in 24 appearances. One of these two will have to be bought down with TAM if Orlando wants to play this year.

Dwyer, the last DP, scored 13 goals with no assists.

That is 20 goals and 11 assists combined between the three designated players. Three players in MLS scored that many alone while 20 provided at least 11 assists.

While Nani might help that output, he won’t be a huge asset defensively, and it still doesn’t fix the fact Orlando have a gaping Yoshi Yotun-shaped hole in the midfield.

The additions don’t seem to outweigh to losses — most seen as dead weight, to be fair. However, Yotun wasn’t successfully replaced, and Nani just joins an already bloated but languid attack.

There are too many teams already comfortably stronger than Orlando, and those that are comparable are making major additions and managerial changes (See Dos Santos at Vancouver and Almeyda at San Jose.)

It might take a miracle for Orlando to make the playoffs. It might even be seen as a positive campaign as long as they don’t finish last again with the worst defense in MLS.