FC Schalke: Suat Serdar sure is something… but what exactly is he?

FC Schalke midfielder Suat Serdar has made massive leaps this year across the board, and it’s reached the point now where he’s become impossible to define.

FC Schalke‘s midfield took a hit with the whole Nabil Bentaleb situation, but with faith placed in Omar Mascarell, and that faith being duly repaid, all we needed was a sturdy midfield mate. Weston McKennie is of course the first name I’d think of, but David Wagner has continued to show faith in Suat Serdar.

Serdar had a slow go in his early development at Schalke, but this year, he’s done everything in various showings, and that leaves me over here wondering what exactly he is as a midfielder.

Against Werder Bremen, we saw him lead the team in ball-winning plays with seven. He was a monster in the midfield, and he is also a competent ball carrier with the same kinds of ideas that we often see from the likes of Amine Harit.

He’s a dribbler, albeit a bit rash at times, as all young players can be, but he’s also a chance creator with an eye for that inquisitive pass that defenders just can’t deal with. The kinds of passes that, when they don’t come off, look a bit daft.

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But he’s also scored three goals on the year, good for second on the team behind Amine Harit, and that was before the lengthy injury that caused him to miss about 20 days thus far into the season. And they weren’t cheap goals either. They were intuitive. Sharp. The kinds that you expect creative midfielders with an eye for runs into the box to score.

Add to that his rapid ascendance into the German international set-up, where he has obviously caught the eye of some pretty important people with the hodgepodge skillset that he has.

You don’t always have to define a player to make them legitimate, but Suat Serdar is shaping up to be the kind of midfielder that I always saw in Aaron Ramsey. Some days he does certain things, some days he does others. It makes it hard to know what to consistently rely on, and it makes it hard to know where on the pitch to put him, but it doesn’t make it hard to know that he 100% should be on the pitch every match day.

Now it’s just a matter of figuring out our best midfield configuration, because I’m not overly fond of a starting XI without Weston McKennie.