Griezmann Scored Twice and Still Didn't Score Orlando's Best Goal

Antoine Griezmann scored twice against D.C. United on Saturday night and was voted MLS Player of the Matchday. Both of those things are fair enough.

Neither is the most interesting thing that happened at Inter&Co Stadium.

The most interesting thing was what Marco Pašalić said afterwards. He scored Orlando's fourth goal in a 4-1 win, and when reporters asked him about the night, he spent it talking about somebody else's goal.

"It was a crazy goal," he said, laughing. "I have to say to Tincho congratulations. These goals you don't see every weekend or every game, so I think this is something you have to watch like 100 times, maybe not like 10 times like my goal."

That's a player who has just scored in a four-goal win, telling a room full of reporters that his teammate's effort is worth ten times his own. Martín Ojeda is Tincho.

In the 22nd minute Griezmann lofted a pass over D.C. United's back line to him, the sort of ball that usually ends with a forward checking his run and the move dying there.

Ojeda never turned. With his back to goal he arched backwards and hooked his heel up over himself to meet it, and the ball nestled just inside the far post. Orlando's own match report calls it a scorpion kick.

Orlando's own account posted it twice, once calling it Puskás-worthy and tagging FIFA, once simply telling Tincho to take a bow. The league put it in the Goal of the Matchday vote and its own writer called it a golazo worth rewatching.

Nobody involved was being subtle about what they thought of it.

Here is where it gets awkward for the story everybody wanted to tell.

Griezmann scored his eleventh and twelfth MLS goals of the season, his third brace of the year, and became the first player in league history to record a goal contribution in twelve of his first fourteen MLS matches. That is an absurd rate, and it is exactly what Orlando signed him to produce.

But look at how the first one arrived. Griezmann chipped the ball to Daryl Dike, took the return, then played a give-and-go with Ojeda before finishing. Ojeda got the assist. Seven minutes later they reversed the roles.

So the World Cup winner's night was two goals, one of which his Argentine teammate helped build, and an assist for the goal of the weekend.

That reads less like a superstar carrying a team and more like two good players finding each other, which is the kind of contribution that rarely shows up in a headline figure. Which is a less marketable sentence, and a more accurate one.

There is a reflex in how MLS gets covered, and the league is not entirely innocent in it either. A designated player signs, the coverage reorganises itself around him, and everything good that follows gets filed under his name.

None of which means the signing was a mistake. Griezmann at twelve goals in fourteen games is doing precisely what he was paid to do.

It means the DP is a component, not an explanation. The gap between those two ideas is where most MLS writing goes wrong.

Why Pašalić's quote matters more than the scoreline

Players are usually careful in front of microphones. They praise the famous teammate, they say the right thing about the manager, they move on, and what they choose to say is rarely accidental.

Pašalić did something else. He ranked the goals, put his own second, and laughed about it.

That tells you more about the room at Orlando than any statistic does. Nobody in there thinks Griezmann's arrival turned this into Griezmann's team.

Four days before this match, Ojeda became Orlando City's all-time leading goalscorer across all competitions. The scorpion kick was his 49th for the club and his sixteenth of 2026, and his assist for Griezmann was his 46th, one short of Mauricio Pereyra's club record.

He has been at Orlando since 2023. He was there before the 2018 World Cup winner showed up and he will be there after.

Saturday was not his breakout. It was the night the cameras happened to be pointed at him.

Orlando are 12-13-5 on 41 points, sitting in an automatic playoff qualification place with four regular-season games left. That is the part that decides their season.

If they go deep, the headlines will read like Griezmann took them there. Some of that will be true.

But the version where a World Cup winner arrives and lifts a club single-handedly is a story, and the version where he slots into a side that already had a player capable of producing the goal of the weekend is what the tape shows.

Watch the Ojeda goal again. Then decide which one you're buying.