The path forward for USMNT midfielder Wil Trapp

It’s time to ponder how Will Trapp fits with the USMNT going forward, and why he’s faced undue criticism from the fanbase.

A year of low-stakes friendlies and experimentation since 2017’s World Cup disaster has featured a whole lot of Wil Trapp in defensive midfield. He’s played more minutes in that span than any other American. The 25-year-old has been touted as part of the future for years, even as younger center midfielders have emerged, bound for better leagues and most likely more fruitful careers. US Soccer coaches seem to like him a whole lot better than fans do.

Trapp isn’t Tyler Adams or Weston McKennie, with no prestigious Bundesliga contract. At 25, Trapp hasn’t been a prospect in years. People sour quickly on players who don’t ooze potential. Trapp has always felt refined, being a natural on-field leader and playing a position of responsibility, so once age dropped labels of “potential”, he faced an uphill battle for approval.

Playing from the beginning for his hometown Columbus Crew, Trapp is an MLS lifer, and while the occasional rumor has emerged about a move to Europe, he’s always been tightly attached to Gregg Berhalter and the Crew.

For some US fans, a stigma comes with playing in the domestic league, as though a player isn’t challenging himself or using his abilities effectively. Most of that is unwarranted. It’s no doubt important for the national team to have players in good leagues around the world, but growth and comfort trumps all. MLS, for its varying development flaws, can provide that growth and comfort.

Trapp is an interesting case because he’s one of few MLS homegrowns whohase been trusted from the beginning and spent so long as a team’s centerpiece. Columbus have built around him. Bill Hamid with D.C. United might have been the only comparable case before Hamid departed (briefly) for a fruitless spell in Denmark.

MLS teams often neglectthe in-house development of domestic players, missing an opportunity to find their own Trapp. The situation for some is improving, in places like Philadelphia and Salt Lake City. Trapp is an overlooked early part of the beginnings of an MLS youth movement, a near-best-case example of what can happen when you subscribe to the Play The Kids policy.

He is no Alphonso Davies, or Adams, or even teammate Zack Steffen, with no high-profile European offers. That’s fine, because he’s a good few notches below Davies and Adams. That inferiority to the top-tier of Homegrowns could be part of what gains him dislike from fragments of the USMNT fanbase. He will not be getting big contracts from Bayern Munich any time soon.

We should expect to see more of Trapp in the coming years, given that Berhalter is the clear favorite for the national team job. The US have not recently seen players with his skillset emerge at the national team level, mostly because such players are rare. His strengths, often obscured by his weaknesses, are rooted in ball possession and movement. He hits diagonal switches with regularity in Columbus, capitalizing on a system that prioritizes width. He drops between the center-backs and distributes with everything in front of him, always looking to play forward.

Passing statistics are best used for identifying styles of play, rather than strengths and weaknesses, so I won’t bombard you with passing percentages and the like. But Trapp’s xBuildup% is 96 percent, per American Soccer Analysis, measuring how often he is involved in his team’s possessions. The answer: A lot. He’s a guy that will get on the ball and dictate the game.

His weaknesses, and what generally have convinced people he’s not a national teamer, are his turnovers — he can sometimes be sloppy on the ball, particularly on the international level — and his ball-winning and physical traits. Trapp can get beat in one-on-one battles against stronger attackers, and he does not clean up defensive messes at the level of, say, D.C. United’s Russell Canouse. Playing him as a lone d-mid, even alongside Adams and/or McKennie, may not be a great idea against top-tier competition.

It’s likely that Trapp is best suited for Concacaf opposition, where the US are more likely to control play. In WCQ, the US had trouble truly dictating the pace of the game against vastly inferior opposition, especially on the road. Trapp can pass and free other midfielders to bomb forward.

The US tired its players too much in the last cycle, too often neglecting to rotate the squad for a look that would better suit the opponent. It’s okay to not start someone who usually would be a part of your best XI if you’ve got a game four days later in Honduras. Trapp is good enough to be in that conversation, particularly as a specialty ball-mover.

His role at the top of the lineup is likely blocked by Adams and McKennie, who look like they’ll be number 8s for the US. A double-pivot with those two would be a suitable idea, and it would remove Trapp, Michael Bradley and Canouse from starting roles. In addition, Darlington Nagbe is still around, and Kellyn Acosta has been getting friendly minutes. The midfield depth chart is one of the deepest in the pool.

Still, with Adams and McKennie out injured for the October cycle, Trapp earned another 90 minutes in a 1-1 draw with Peru. He’s not going away.

In some respects, Trapp is the second coming of Bradley. They both have anchored quality MLS teams for years. They play as pure defensive midfielders, with differing individual skillsets but similar ball-moving, ground-covering responsibilities. They are the captains of their teams, the on-field leaders. They play every minute of seemingly every game.

Most strikingly, they’ve garnered avalanches of disapproval from a volatile United States national team fanbase. Bradley, being the centerpiece of everything good and bad for the USMNT for the last decade, is either loved, hated or somewhere in between by everyone. It’s his perceived excessive on-ball turnovers, or his move from Europe back to MLS, or just because he’s a popular target. Criticisms are similar to Trapp’s.

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Whether Trapp plays as big a role for the national team as Bradley has is doubtful. He probably shouldn’t. That doesn’t mean he can’t be hailed as a Homegrown success, as a player that has gone from a young, physically-frail Columbus native to one of MLS’s better defensive midfielders. His improvement since he was signed has been impressively linear.

His future is almost assuredly with the national team, in some way or another. The criticism will remain gratuitous.