MLS is making strides in player identification and development. Whatever you may feel about the speed at which it’s doing this, things are better now than they were a few years ago, and a few years before that, and on we go.

But if you look at the numbers, those strides are primarily concentrated in clusters. MLS (and specifically our academy, college and club system) has done yeoman’s work developing holding midfielders, defenders, keepers and, in smaller numbers, strikers for the next level. If the USMNT is anything, it’s a mirror reflecting the player pool as a whole. And at each of those positions the U.S. has generated a player worthy of distinction.

The area where the U.S. system has not succeeded, however, is with attacking midfielders.

For reasons too legion to delve deeply into today (training methods, nurtured abilities, genetics?) attacking midfielders have historically been a sucking void in the American developmental landscape. They are mercurial talents, difficult to produce and even more difficult to identify at an early age, and it takes a patient and determined coach to give them space and time to experiment as first team players. It’s a far easier thing to draft (or sign) a 6-foot-2, 200-pound center back (or striker, for that matter) than take a flier on the 5-foot-6, 145-pound creative who could be ground into dust by the Hulk you decided not to take. This is an awful, destructive mindset, but it prevails in pockets.

On the whole, MLS coaches are doing better (albeit not wonderfully, still) in terms of lending first team minutes to young players. They are not, however, earning high marks as a fraternity in their treatment of young attacking midfielders.

For the purposes of a cross-sectional study, I used two player pools to determine how many minutes MLS coaches were giving young attacking players on a representative basis. The first was a simple one: the Homegrown tag. There are currently 77 Homegrown players in MLS, and with Christian Lucatero’s recent signing for the Houston Dynamo, 18 of those can be classified as “attacking” midfielders. Keep in mind that I assigned these classifications myself via experience, my own observations and my definition of the term. These are not sitting midfielders or shadow strikers. They’re midfielders who like to get forward and join the attack unencumbered by so much defensive spadework. It’s not necessarily just a No. 10, or a No. 7, or a No. 11. Think more broadly here – players who can make things happen in the attacking third, one way or another.

The other pool I used was the 75-man 24 Under 24 ballot used by MLSSoccer.com’s voting bloc for 2015. Of those 75 players, 49 didn’t overlap with the Homegrown list, so I threw that number in the pot to complete the field. Mash those two together and we’ve got a healthy cross-section of 126 total players under the age of 24, which is not “young,” per se, but is a quality cutoff for our purposes here. That’s especially the case when you consider the vast majority of those 126 players are under 24 years old. A solid number are under 20.

So. Of those 126 players, 35 can be classified as “attacking” midfielders – 17 of 49 24U24 players and 18 of 77 Homegrowns. That’s 27 percent. The number in itself isn’t bad. It could be higher, but rope in the rest of your positional needs and it makes sense. But what about playing time? This is when the numbers get a bit dicey.

The first thing to do is break out the numbers into Homegrown and 24U24 categories. The 24U24 players are largely older, and so they naturally receive more playing time. Over the first six months of the 2015 season, our 17 24U24 players have gotten an average of 1,075 league minutes per player. Teams have played an average of 27 MLS games so far this season. That breaks out to about 39 minutes per game.

The Homegrown numbers are magnitudes worse. Our intrepid 18 HG midfielders have earned a total of 5,954 minutes of first team action this season. That’s an average of 330 minutes per player, which makes out to an average of 55 minutes per month. Not great at all.

Mash those two numbers together and we arrive at our playing time average for our 35 midfielders: 664 minutes per player over six months. You decide whether that’s enough for the talent to grow out of the soil.

There are some notable caveats we need to throw into the blender. A scant few of these players, like Lucatero, for instance, haven’t had much time to earn their way into the first team. Some, like Plata, lost some or most of their season to injury. Some, like Melano, haven’t been with their teams for the full season. And some simply aren’t good enough. I’ll leave it up to you to decide who belongs in that category, but it’s a much smaller number than the statistics indicate.

But the broader question is why they’re not good enough, and why so many MLS coaches are so reticent to pull the trigger on young attacking midfielders with any consistency. The easy answer is job security (it’s easier to justify a struggling Sanna Nyassi, bizarrely, than it is to justify a struggling Tommy Thompson), but the wider lens reveals an ethos that doesn’t include patience for a position that isn’t as easy to break down statistically as its brethren. Training players in this mold takes dedication, but more than that, it takes a coaching mindset not enough in MLS have.

The coaches that deserve praise are represented by their players. Carl Robinson at Vancouver is unquestionably the dean of the league’s cadre of young attacking midfielders. He stockpiles them like pelts for an Alaskan winter. More importantly, he plays them. Would Manneh, who was thought of by a number of MLS coaches as too soft and easily marked out with the Aztex, have been the same player under a Klopas or a Yallop? Perhaps not. It’s fair to speculate he certainly wouldn’t have gotten the playing time in a less interesting attacking framework. And look at where Vancouver is in the standings. That’s an ethos as much as it is anything else.

There are other coaches who do fine work with young attack-minded midfielders. Oscar Pareja at FC Dallas deserves praise, as do coaches like Jason Kreis, Caleb Porter and Adrian Heath, all of whom have shown a willingness to test their young midfielders without yanking them off the field at the first hint of struggle. There will be struggles. The measure of a good coach is how he coaches through them.

Young attacking midfielders are difficult to coach. They’re a 2.0 assignment in many ways. But they are vital, and they need first team minutes to thrive. That’s not to say that everyone on this list deserves first team minutes right now, but how many were (or are currently being) strangled too early without the oxygen needed to develop? Could a player like Luis Gil, for instance, been saved from himself with more consistent deployment? It’s a discussion worth having.

MLS at its core should strive to be far more like the Dutch Eredivisie than the EPL. The league’s economic realities make development a far more vital pathway forward than blind spending, and it’s a more repeatable metric without vast quantities of cash refreshing the system. And the world’s most exciting (and lucrative, for sell-on purposes) players aren’t strikers, or holding midfielders, or defenders, or goalkepers. They are attacking midfielders. And MLS coaches by and large are not giving theirs enough room to breathe.

Here’s our cross-sectional list. Again, there are a number of different circumstances that accompany each player, but it’s a good guide to follow. Somebody get Carl Robinson a raise.

Chicago Fire

HG Collin Fernandez (Zero)

HG Harry Shipp (2,061)

Columbus Crew

HG Ben Speas (157)

Cedrick (147)

Colorado Rapids

Juan Ramirez (1,199)

FC Dallas

HG Coy Craft (6)

HG Danny Garcia (Zero)

HG Alejandro Zendejas (Zero)

Fabian Castillo (2,069)

Houston Dynamo

HG Christian Lucatero (Zero)

Alexander Lopez (947)

LA Galaxy

HG Bradford Jamieson (457)

HG Raul Mendiola (Zero)

HG Jose Villarreal (666)

Sebastian Lletget (981)

New England Revolution

HG Diego Fagundez (1,193)

Kelyn Rowe (1,312)

NYCFC

Kwadwo Poku (855)

Khiry Shelton (704)

New York Red Bulls

HG Sean Davis (260)

Philadelphia Union

Erik Ayuk (937)

Portland Timbers

Lucas Melano (310)

Real Salt Lake

HG Sebastian Saucedo (168)

Joao Plata (1,026)

Luis Gil (1,381)

San Jose Earthquakes

HG Tommy Thompson (437)

Seattle Sounders

HG Aaron Kovar (201)

Cristian Roldan (1,098)

Toronto FC

HG Jay Chapman (186)

Jonathan Osorio (1,535)

Vancouver Whitecaps

HG Marco Bustos (Zero)

HG Kianz Froese (162)

Kekuta Manneh (1,809)

Nicolas Mezquida (916)

Cristian Techera (1,062)