“I felt like my personality was well suited to it,” Eric Ramsay says, explaining why he jumped into coaching as a teenager. There is drive and inquisitiveness to the Welshman, who was on the backroom staff at Manchester United before moving to the USA to become Minnesota United’s manager last March. Before the real stuff begins, Ramsay wants to know about life at the Guardian. Is this the interviewee putting the interviewer at ease? Or evidence of someone who knows how to connect with strangers?
Ramsay has the leadership gene. He grew up in a small market town in rural Wales and was a busy type, captaining the county team and putting on coaching sessions for local children. “At 14 or 15 I could get a feel for what my coaching voice was,” he says. What was he like? “More self-conscious. You trip, you stumble. But I felt like I was making enough of a mark with kids for it to grab me. From 16 or 17 almost everything I did was geared towards that pathway.”
Ramsay mixed coaching with playing as a midfielder in the Welsh Premier League for TNS but opted against signing professionally and went to study sports science and sports psychology at Loughborough University.
A question about typical student escapades is swerved. Ramsay hopes people would describe him as “pretty studious and meticulous”. Being fluent in French and Spanish is an asset. It comes from his late father, who became a languages teacher after leaving his role as a drummer for the rock and roll band Old Tennis Shoes.
“My dad went to university really late to study languages,” Ramsay says. “My brother and I lived in France and Spain with him whilst he did six months here, six months there as part of the programme. Then he taught languages from home so we would have an endless stream of students in and out.”
Being a Spanish speaker helps when you are managing a Major League Soccer team. “Half of my group doesn’t speak English,” he says. “It is such an important quality for any coach who wants to hit a certain level. We were talking about the skill of people like Thomas Tuchel, who can sit in press conferences and answer in three or four languages.”
Ramsay considers himself fortunate to have landed a role in Swansea’s academy after leaving university. He talks about latching on to the Swansea way, a possession-based style built by managers such as Roberto Martínez, Brendan Rodgers and Michael Laudrup, before becoming Shrewsbury’s academy manager.
The challenges kept coming. Ramsay mixed with the first-team setup and had a stint as Shrewsbury’s interim head coach. “It gave me a lot of confidence,” he says.
Others saw Ramsay’s potential. Neil Bath, then Chelsea’s highly respected academy director, hired him. As Chelsea’s under-23s manager, Ramsay coached Marc Guéhi, Levi Colwill, Lewis Hall, Tino Livramento, Tariq Lamptey and Billy Gilmour. “It felt like going to footballing Disneyland, relative to where I’d been, in terms of facilities and the raw talent at Chelsea,” he says.
It was a huge leap, “a raw coaching experience as good as it gets”. Soon came an offer to work under Ole Gunnar Solskjær at United. There was a link with an old acquaintance from Loughborough: Kieran McKenna was part of Solskjær’s team.
Ramsay is not surprised that McKenna has performed wonders at Ipswich. Will his path be similar? Ramsay learned a lot from Solskjær, Ralf Rangnick and Erik ten Hag at Old Trafford. He also helped Michael Carrick during the former England midfielder’s spell as interim manager.
“The big things I take away from Ole, Ralf and Erik is that ability to be at the front of a club that size with a level of ease,” Ramsay says. “The conviction that requires is significant. Ole did it in a really relaxed, comfortable way. Ralf with more intensity – a really good communicator. Erik had that real meticulousness. What you don’t appreciate unless you’re up close is to lead that club, and have a real sense of ‘I’m going to be the guy to drag this group forward’, takes incredible energy.”
Ramsay was not overawed by working with players such as Casemiro and Cristiano Ronaldo. But when it came to taking his first step into management, he looked to Major League Soccer instead of a Football League club.
“You get an element of patience,” Ramsay says. “If you look at it, the lifespan of a manager in MLS versus the Championship is significantly longer. I’m sort of out of the spotlight that young British coaches would be in at any level if they took a job [in English football]. You get to develop some of the things that are really important in a coach’s trajectory. You’re doing it with a sense of stability.”
Ramsay does not have a huge budget at Minnesota. There are no big foreign stars. They finished sixth in the Western Conference and lost to the richer LA Galaxy in the MLS Cup playoffs. “The league itself is phenomenally interesting,” he says. “It’s the most multinational on the planet. You’ve got crazy talent pools that you can pull from South America.
“The players leaving are going to top clubs in Europe. It’s no longer the cliched retirement league. I’ve benefited from that. Some of the games can feel like the top of the Championship. Some players can comfortably play in the Premier League.
“It’s almost the ultimate test of pragmatism for a coach. Last year we used the most players in the MLS. You don’t pause during international breaks. We really suffered during the Copa América for availability. We ended up basically with a really good start, a really tricky middle and then a really good finish. I look back proudly.
“I really like the way our team looked toward the end of last year. We weren’t a team that dominated possession. We were really organised offensively, very compact, very difficult to play through. But we attacked aggressively. We counterattacked. For a team that rarely had more than 40 to 45% of the ball we were very good to watch, as much as I want to be a coach that dominates in all phases of the game.”
Ramsay talks about the importance of adapting to the needs of a squad. Idealism can be a hindrance. His academy background means he takes great satisfaction from developing players but he understands the pressure on a No 1 to produce results.
The positive for Ramsay is that he has been doing this for years. Along with McKenna he is part of a new wave. If coaching is a science then Ramsay can draw on a long, enviable education. He does not see himself as better than retired players who go straight into management, but there is no doubting the depth of his knowledge.
It has been an unusual journey. The MLS season begins next month and after spending Christmas at home Ramsay is back in the freezing temperatures of Minnesota, ready for the next step of the adventure. “I’ve always been outward-looking,” he says. “I wanted the world to feel open as a coach.”
