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A Hater’s Guide to Orlando City

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Welcome to a Hater’s Guide to Orlando City. Hopefully, I’ll be able to provide you with a hater’s guide for every opponent the rest of the year, but I figured there wouldn’t be a better place to start than the team from Florida.

Take the facts put forth in this guide with many grains of salt. I’ve put minimal effort into researching them.

The City

Tallest building: The 441 feet tall Suntrust Center

The Suntrust Center would be tied for 28th tallest in Atlanta with something called the Two Alliance Center. Not even top-25. Their tallest building wouldn’t even get a number by its name on the ESPN ticker. It looks like the ‘roided lovechild of the Texas School Book Depository where Kennedy was shot and Disney’s Tower of Terror.

City symbol: Apparently, it’s this fountain?

I guess it’s appropriate that the city symbol is something usually found as the centerpiece of retirement communities and malls to make them seem fancy.

Largest Industry: Tourism

Over 62 million people a year come to the outskirts of Orlando each year to leave almost as soon as they’ve arrived.

They leave hot, at each other’s throats and angry that they were somehow tricked into paying thousands of dollars to stand in line, eat bad food and watch tacky theme park shows.

That Orlando has been able to keep up the ruse that their theme parks aren’t awful money vacuums for this long is commendable and the only thing I will applaud them for in this piece.

Weather: It seems nice.

And the city is far enough inland that it doesn’t get wrecked by hurricanes all the time. However, despite being the largest inland city in the state, it’s just the fourth largest overall. The other three are on the coast.

The conclusion? Millions of people would rather be hit by a literal hurricane than live in Orlando.

Notable Residents: Carrot Top, A.J. Pierzynski, Daniel Tosh, two members of *NSYNC, and Casey Anthony.

Yup.

The Team

History: The club was founded in 2008 in Austin, Texas and took on the name Austin Aztex FC due to the owner’s desire to make an important historical society known as the Aztecs appeal more to what he called “the cool kids” by adding an X to the original Aztecs name to make the CS sound at the end of the name. “Do you get it?” he kept asking. “It’s an X, which isn’t how you actually spell it, but — you may not believe this, but stick with me — that X, which is one letter instead of two, makes the same sound as the original name! Isn’t that crazy and fun? No? Ok, let me explain it one more time...”

After minimal success, the club left Austin in 2010 to both literally and figuratively move down a tier by moving to Orlando. Orlando City SC was founded in 2010 as a team in the third division, USL Pro League. Their logo was drawn by the first artsy looking kid they found outside of a UCF dorm.

Their first professional team took the field in 2011 and actually won the USL Pro championship. They would win again in 2013 and 2014, proving that a team from Orlando can actually make the playoffs and be successful, just as long as they’re two divisions below MLS.

In 2015, they joined MLS with the club’s first and only head coach, Adrian Heath, at the helm. After a year and half, Heath was banished to Minnesota for failing to complete the near impossible task of dragging an Orlando team to the playoffs.

The MLS version of Orlando City has yet to make the playoffs, finishing seventh in the Eastern Conference in 2015, and eighth in 2016. Currently, they sit in seventh place in the table with a -8 goal differential. They feel happy here, as the familiarity evokes warm feelings of nostalgia for years past.

They recently made the most expensive trade in MLS history to acquire striker Dom Dwyer, after the Orlando front office took one too many shots during Applebee’s happy hour and realized all the money they were saving on drinks thanks to Applebee’s could be spent on soccer players, and said, “Hey, what about that Dom Toretto guy who was here on loan once?”

Uniform: Grimace from McDonaldland: The kit

Mascot: A nightmare lion that loves the movie Step Up 2: The Streets, and Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes of TLC.

Coach: Jason Kreis

A man so bad at his job, people think Louis Van Gaal could do it better.

Best Player: Cyle Larin

The team’s all-time leader in appearances and goals, and a man who’s .182 BAC level made him forget that even Canadians drive on the right side of the road.

A man who wears flannels to party in Florida during the middle of the summer.

And a man who freely admits to an under the table agreement between his employer and local police to keep players in less than admirable situations out of police custody and off the local news.

The Fans

Supporter’s Groups: Ruckus and Iron Lion Firm

Both groups have been suspended/given a stern talking to by the club for cursing at Disney World and for setting off fireworks in the middle of a Tampa Bay Rowdies crowd.

Their People: Super hardcore and edgy AF.

For example:

They’ve got a mean right hook*

*when no one is expecting it and they’re distracting the person by throwing bottles at nearby people

They like to dox Atlanta United team staff and find out which hotel the team is staying in and pull the fire alarm at said hotel at 3:45 in the morning. Real adult humans did this.

No, seriously.

And they also like to deface billboards that were just trying to bring something nice to look at to the city for once.

Essentially, we’re dealing with a group of rogue commando’s here and if you see one in their natural habitat (wearing jean shorts, drinking Natural Light, listening to Tyga) this weekend, please do not approach one. You could be in danger.

Conclusion

The city is a tacky hellscape, the team is mediocre and the state they live in is somehow the worst in the southeast. Can we really blame their fans for lashing out and making the choices they do when they have to live in Florida?

Yes.