Inter Miami CF vs. Orlando City SC: Keys to Sunday Night Soccer

The Sunday Night Soccer presented by Continental Tire show heads back down to Fort Lauderdale for the first Florida Derby match in a full year (7 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+). That’s right – the last time Inter Miami CF and Orlando City SC renewed their vows was May 15 of 2024, a night that produced a contentious scoreless draw.

I think we’re expecting more goals and just as much bad blood this year. The hosts got off to a torrid start but have hit hard times lately, as the wear and tear of getting everyone’s best shot every week seems to be getting to them.

That’s music to Orlando’s ears since they’ve played better this season when they’ve brought an emotional edge to the game, including during their current 10-game unbeaten streak. There's gonna be plenty of that in this Rivalry Week showdown, before LA Galaxy and LAFC resume El Tráfico pleasantries for Part 2 of our Sunday Night Soccer doubleheader (9 pm ET | MLS Season Pass, Apple TV+).

Inter Miami CF

• Let’s not overthink this and take for granted how Lionel Messi plays in MLS. The GOAT has been the only consistent player for Inter Miami this year and is in the midst of what’s starting to feel like a real carry job.
• Six weeks ago my colleague Sacha Kljestan had Luis Suárez atop the way-early Landon Donovan MLS MVP rankings, and I didn’t disagree with him. He’s been missing in action since then, and his side has suffered. The Herons need their No. 9.
• At this point, I guess it’s Noah Allen? David Martínez and Maxi Falcón were supposed to be the starting center backs, but it’s the homegrown kid who’s earned Javier Mascherano’s trust. And given how many breakdowns Allen has to put out in front of him, he’s doing a LOT of emergency defending.

Orlando City SC

• After spending a few weeks in the wilderness while Oscar Pareja tinkered with the lineup, playmaker Martín Ojeda got back into the XI with a bang – a hat-trick-flavored bang – last week against New England.
• I am notoriously not a big Pedro Gallese guy, but the veteran goalkeeper has been immense this year, including a 563-minute shutout streak that only ended last weekend.
• Luis Muriel didn’t do much last year, then he won the No. 9 job this year, and now he might lose it again? He’s been slumping since March (despite a goal in Wednesday’s 3-1 win over Charlotte), and it’s not hard to imagine he’ll get shifted back into a super-sub role.

The Herons were flying, atop the Supporters’ Shield standings on 2.6 points per game through the start of April. Part of that was they have Messi and Suárez and other good players, so you’re gonna brute force some wins if that’s your lineup. But a bigger part was they were playing the type of ball that indicated they’d remain at those lofty heights for months to come.

That has gone away over the past month. Instead of tightening up defensively, they’ve gotten gappier through midfield. Instead of becoming less reliant on Messi as players have settled in, they’ve thrust more onto his shoulders.

And so they have suffered. They're 2W-2L-3D in league play since the start of April, but overall it’s much worse: 3W-5L-3D. This 11-game stretch has laid bare their shortcomings while knocking them down the Shield standings and out of the Concacaf Champions Cup entirely.

The performances have been bad, and the body language has been worse. A home loss to a rival bringing hundreds of fans with them for the trip? My god, man. It’d be panic stations.

House money, really. The nice thing about going against a team with Messi and the other FC Barcelona boys is you’re not really expected to win – at least not by the public and the press, and not even, probably, by most of your own fans. There’s just such a perceived gap in quality between the talent on both teams that all the pressure naturally falls onto the guys in pink.

The reality, though, is Orlando know very well they have every chance of winning this game and the perceived gap is fictional. Minnesota showed it last week, Vancouver showed it twice in a dominant, two-legged CCC series win and Orlando themselves have been showing it (for the most part, anyway; let’s not talk about that 5-0 loss in March last year) since Miami entered the league a half-decade ago.

So the stakes are the same as they always are against the Herons: win and you get headlines that impress the neutrals, bragging rights for the fanbase, and three points that really, really matter in the standings and the locker room.

Accomplish all that and the unbeaten streak, of course, goes to 11.

Inter Miami CF: Defensive form

The numbers are not terrible compared to last year's team, but the eye test is a big old ooof. Javier Mascherano told me before their game at Houston on Matchday 2 that it would take Inter Miami about two months to figure out their ideal center-back pairing and back four. Well, we are way past that point and they haven't found it. Any combination has been shaky and honestly, their best center back has been Noah Allen – and he's not a natural at the position.

Mascherano has a lot of work to do. It also doesn't help that the defensive midfield is in the same situation. I don't believe they have found the best candidate to pair with Sergio Busquets. I think it should be Yannick Bright, but also believe they're trying to give Federico Redondo all the chances they can, potentially to the detriment of the team.

Orlando City SC: Martín Ojeda's form

The Argentinian is the best player in MLS that nobody is going crazy for. He’s my second favorite player to watch in the league right now behind RSL's Diego Luna.

Ojeda started the season scorching everyone and everything, and he was my MVP pick by Matchday 7. After that, he got into a bit of an offensive slump (as the whole team did) with no goals and no assists for five games. No más. Four goals in the last two games, eight total for the season (plus three assists) and he's back into my MVP race. If I must vote for my 2025 MLS MVP today, it would be a toss-up between Ojeda and San Jose's Cristian Espinoza.

I believe Ojeda is going to absolutely torture whoever is playing right back for Miami on Sunday night (Marcelo Weigandt, Gonzalo Luján, etc.) and have a monster game.

Inter Miami CF

They’ve primarily played out of what I’ll call a 4-4-1-1 this year when both Messi and Suárez have been available. Messi is nominally a forward in that shape – they’ll usually defend with a front two and banks of four behind him, so it looks like a 4-4-2 without the ball – but he’s totally free to drop in and become a playmaker, or flare wide to become a winger, or even, yes, do forward things running off of Suárez’s movement and hold-up play.

It’s a completely free role, and that’s why I hesitate to call it a 4-4-2. In the modern game, the function of the 4-4-2 is to create a forward partnership that operates almost exclusively in transition (there are no possession-focused 4-4-2 teams anymore).

With Messi, the game is simply oriented around him because when you orient things around Messi, he makes goals happen:

The midfield balance then becomes simple: Sergio Busquets and either Federico Redondo or Yannick Bright deep, with a pair of runners – some combo of Fafà Picault, Telasco Segovia and Tadeo Allende – in front of them. Of the three, Picault has been the most consistently dangerous and useful this year because he’s the one who most consistently makes unselfish runs into the depth. Players like that are purely additive alongside Messi and Suárez.

Segovia has had moments of brilliance on the ball, but is still sorting his way through what to do off of it. And Allende… might finally have had his breakout game in Wednesday's 3-3 draw at San Jose.

The backline is oriented around Jordi Alba’s relentless desire to push forward, which has its pluses and minuses. The biggest plus, obviously, is that he and Messi have a decades-long mind-meld in the final third. When the GOAT finally retires and the six-hour-long “All Messi’s Goals” compilation is released, Alba might show up more often in a supporting role than anyone except Dani Alves.

The minus is this:

That’s on Jordi. He goes walkabout for no reason at all.

He does that a lot, though usually it’s on the overlap. That means Allen slides out wide and the back four becomes a back three as the Herons shift into a 3-2-5 shape with the ball, as most modern teams do.

Orlando City SC

Since Day 1 in MLS, Orlando head coach Oscar Pareja has preferred a 4-2-3-1 with a classic No. 10. That’s how he won the Shield-US Open Cup double with FC Dallas nine years ago, and it’s how he scraped the Lions off the bottom of the table since his arrival in central Florida at the start of the decade.

But as the game and personnel have changed, Pareja’s had to change as well. The big one, in my opinion, is the tactical shift: Orlando are still using a 4-2-3-1, but instead of a 4-2-3-1 with a pulley system where one fullback stays if the other goes, which creates overloads on one side or the other (with the downside of occasionally getting the rest defense out of whack and leaving the backline exposed), they’ve shifted to the asymmetrical version where only one fullback pushes forward and the opposite fullback tucks in to create a back three.

For Miami, it’s Alba (the left fullback) who pushes up while the right fullback tucks in. For Orlando, it’s right fullback Alex Freeman (No. 30 on the graphic below) who's flying forward:

Bear in mind that he and No. 24 (Kyle Smith) are nominally playing the same position in the back four. But it’s a very different role.

And so it’s led to an up-and-down season for Orlando, who haven’t quite figured out the attack/defense balance. It’s either been all gas, no brakes or all brakes, no gas – that loooong shutout streak of Gallese’s coincided with a looooong scoreless streak of their own, and at one point they had four 0-0s in five outings.

The big issue is that, with Eduard Atuesta hurt, they lack a line-breaking passer deep in central midfield. So if they can't do that, they probably need to go back to the pulley system and start creating those wide overloads. The issue that creates, of course, is an unbalanced defense, and if your defense is unbalanced against Miami, you’re suddenly in a shootout against the greatest goalscorer ever.

Now, I will say that they have been much better at finding that balance, even without Atuesta, over the past few games. Ojeda has also been on an absolute tear.

But still, this feels like a pick-your-poison situation.

Gonna assume Suárez is back after missing the past two outings for personal reasons.

No reason to think it’ll be any different from midweek, though I’m keeping an eye on center forward.