From laughingstock to record holders: Orlando's NWSL journey

Imagine a cursed franchise or suffering fan base -- say, the Cleveland Browns, to name one easy example. Now imagine that team putting together the best season in league history, rattling off 23 games without defeat.

What sounds unthinkable is reality for the Orlando Pride in 2024. The franchise that was once the laughingstock of the National Women's Soccer League is now the team everyone is chasing heading into the playoffs, and it is one of the best sports stories of the year.

"People wrote us off," Orlando coach Seb Hines said after his team clinched the NWSL Shield in October, marking its 23rd match without a loss. "People didn't want to come to the club. People had no hope with this club."

Hines isn't exaggerating. Waves of players have left Orlando in recent years amid ongoing tumult, and years of poor performances made the team an afterthought even in a small, 14-team league. That dire history is what makes this year's run even more remarkable. Among the Pride's league records are an eight-game winning streak this year and an unbeaten streak that reached 24 games including last year's finale. Their 18th win of the season on Saturday also set a record -- one that the Washington Spirit would match later that night -- as did reaching 60 points.

"Pride is a dangerous thing, so I don't want to talk about how proud I am of it, but I will say what this staff and group of athletes has accomplished is exceptional -- it's extraordinary," said Haley Carter, Orlando's VP of soccer operations and sporting director.

Carter joined the club in early 2023 and helped map out a long-term plan to revive its fortunes. Without question, Orlando is ahead of schedule. Now comes a test that many more seasoned teams have failed: Ahead of Friday's quarterfinal with the Chicago Red Stars, can the Pride back up the best regular season with a championship?

Years of futility, followed by an overhaul

Maybe Orlando was not cursed, but the team endured numerous low points on and off the field in the years since its launch in 2016. They were a perennial doormat, finishing in the bottom three of the standings in all but one season of the team's existence (2017, Orlando's only previous playoff appearance) prior to 2023. The Pride's last-place finish in 2019 was marked by 53 goals conceded in 24 games, which is still tied for a league record.

The following year brought trouble off the field, too. As the NWSL became the first team sports league in the U.S. to return to play from the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown, Orlando was the lone squad in the league to watch from home.

Five days before the scheduled start of the tournament, several Pride players tested positive (or, in some cases, inconclusive in the early days of retesting) for COVID, forcing the team to withdraw from the tournament. The spread of the virus throughout the team came following multiple groups of players visiting crowded social establishments in Orlando.

The locker room was fractured by the incident. By the time former general manager Ian Fleming was hired in the 2020-21 offseason, his first order of business was to handle a series of trade requests.

Fleming said shortly after he was hired that "the name value" of players didn't matter if they weren't producing on the field. Orlando was the oldest team by minute allocation in 2021 and had long boasted marquee names such as six-time world player of the year Marta, and United States veterans Alex Morgan, Sydney Leroux, Ali Krieger and Ashlyn Harris.

In December 2020, before his official announcement as GM, United States defender Emily Sonnett was transferred to the Washington Spirit less than a year after arriving in Orlando.

Angel City FC and San Diego Wave FC were entering the NWSL as expansion teams in 2022, and were attractive destinations for players across the league. Morgan and former first-round pick Taylor Flint (nee Kornieck) were traded to San Diego Wave FC in late 2021. Krieger and Harris were also moved to NJ/NY Gotham FC. A few months into the 2022 season, Leroux was traded to Angel City.

Orlando received $665,000 in combined allocation money from those deals alone, in addition to draft picks and players, which led the Pride to rack up over $1 million in additional spending above the cap. That money served as the fuel for their ongoing rebirth.

Only Marta and defenders Carrie Lawrence and Carson Pickett remain on the roster now from spring 2020. Pickett left later midway through 2020 and returned in a mid-season trade this year. "This club is like a whole different club to me now," Pickett told ESPN, noting how many teams across the NWSL have improved.

Making it come together on the field

Success didn't come to Orlando overnight.

Amanda Cromwell was a splashy head-coach hire from UCLA ahead of the 2022 season, but her tenure lasted only seven regular-season games before she was suspended and eventually fired for alleged retaliation and harassment. Hines, who had served as an assistant for the Pride under three different full-time head coaches, took over on an interim basis.

The seeds of this season's success were first planted in summer 2022 as Hines & Co. rattled off a seven-game unbeaten streak. A six-game winless streak followed as the Pride finished 10th of 12 teams, but Hines had instilled belief in the team and in ownership, earning him the coaching job full-time.

Orlando was markedly improved last year -- especially defensively -- and won 10 games. The Pride missed the playoffs as the odd team out of a three-way tiebreaker. There were holes in the roster, including the lack of a go-to scorer, but over the course of the season, Orlando became a team that nobody wanted to play.

"I think it was a blessing how we didn't make playoffs, because we used that fuel going into this year, and we continued that momentum all the way to winning the Shield," Hines said recently. "So, you look at it, you think it's a quick fix, but it certainly hasn't been. We've gone through dark times."

Carter and Hines made savvy roster additions in the offseason, like signing midfielder Angelina in free agency. The big splash came in March when Orlando paid $740,000 -- the second largest global women's transfer fee in history -- to sign Zambian forward Barbra Banda. Her four-year contract is worth around $2.1 million including bonuses, with all that stacked up allocation money from previous years being put to use. Orlando had its star striker.

Banda has scored 13 goals this season, a club record that would have won the NWSL Golden Boot in several previous seasons. Marta, meanwhile, is 38 years old and playing like she is a decade younger, putting in her best campaign since arriving in Orlando. The big names are delivering for the Pride this year, though Orlando is also greater than the sum of its parts. Emily Sams has arguably been the best defender in the league this year, which earned her a spot at the Olympics and a gold medal before her first cap. Center-back partner Kylie Strom is the epitome of the NWSL's ethos as an every-game starter who fought her way back to the league after being waived by the Boston Breakers in 2017 and going to Europe.

Haley McCutcheon has been a workhorse as a holding midfielder. Julie Doyle is a dynamic winger entering her prime who can play off the shoulders of Banda. Goalkeeper Anna Moorhouse set a single-season NWSL record with 13 clean sheets. Everyone in every position is performing at their peak.

"I can tell you guys, I don't think you're going to have [this] again, with this team or another team," an emotional Marta said after the team clinched the NWSL Shield. "I'm sorry, but it's so special, and the way that we did it was incredible."

Can this success be sustained?

The thing about curses -- or consistent futility, for the less superstitious -- is that they usually end at some point. The Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox eventually won another World Series despite the Steve Bartman incident and the Curse of the Bambino. England's men's national team did, eventually, win a penalty shootout again.

Orlando's unprecedented run this season is a clear indication that times have changed for the Pride. This isn't a decent team that finally slogged its way to the playoffs; it is dominant and unrecognizable to the franchise's past.

However, the harsh reality in American sports is also that history remembers who wins in the playoffs. Many -- supposedly cursed -- teams in other sports have managed to put together strong campaigns only to fall flat in the postseason, further perpetuating the narratives that doom is always lurking around the corner.

Pride players and staff are readily aware of the task at hand. With the playoffs expanded to eight teams for the first time, they are the first Shield winners in league history tasked with winning three knockout games to secure a league title. The unbeaten season ended with two losses following that Shield-clinching victory at home, an understandable letdown from the high of celebration and in the context of roster rotation and a jarring travel week due to an impending hurricane landing on Florida.