Eric Ramsay lifts the lid on life working under Erik ten Hag at Man United - and how he believes he would have been 'a good fit' for Ineos - after becoming the youngest manager in MLS history at Minnesota United

The last strains of Wonderwall were still echoing around Allianz Field when Eric Ramsay walked to the side of the pitch and waited for his children.

Carefully, he lifted two-and-a-half-year-old Jac over the perimeter fence, and then held his son’s hand with one hand while using the other to carry one-year-old daughter Lili back onto the grass.

The Minnesota United coach led them to the goalmouth in front of the club’s hardcore supporters who cheered wildly as he helped them to kick a ball over the line.

This is a tradition for the manager and players whenever Minnesota win at home, as is the rousing rendition of Wonderwall. It hadn’t been heard here for some time, though, which explains why Saturday night’s long-awaited victory over San Jose Earthquakes was greeted with a mixture of rapture and relief.

Having helped to engineer the club’s best-ever start to a Major League Soccer season, Ramsay had just brought their worst-ever run of nine games without a win to an end.

It was enough to test even the most experienced of managers. But the man who left his job on Erik ten Hag’s coaching staff at Manchester United in February to become the youngest coach in MLS history at the age of 32 never doubted himself for a moment.

Ramsay knows there were mitigating factors for the slump. One of the smallest squads in the league had been decimated by injuries and international call-ups this summer to the extent that he has only been able to fill the bench in the last two weeks.

He had to call on the walking wounded and put square pegs in round holes as results suffered. The experience of seeing Ten Hag battle similar problems at United last season came in handy.

‘For sure, I took loads from working with Erik. A really impressive guy with a real sense of strength and conviction,’ says Ramsay.

‘Watching Erik from a step removed, dealing with the enormity of what you have at Manchester United when things aren’t going well, that was really helpful.

‘It’s how you deal with these moments that are absolutely decisive in whether you can keep a group going and how far you go as a coach.

‘Even with the guys I saw from two steps back at Chelsea, with (Frank) Lampard and (Thomas) Tuchel when I was working with the Under-23s there, you can’t fail to take things from them.’

Ramsay is giving his first interview to a UK media outlet in a suite at Allianz Field, an impressive venue close to where the Mississippi flows between Minnesota’s twin cities of Minneapolis and St Paul. The 19,600-capacity stadium was sold out as usual for the visit of San Jose.

Ten Hag wanted to keep the highly-rated Welsh coach who was brought in by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer in the summer of 2021. Ramsay was also tempted to stay and work as part of a more dynamic operation at United under new co-owners Ineos.

But having turned down two job offers from the Championship – including one from Minnesota’s chief soccer officer Khaled El-Ahmad when he was CEO of Barnsley – Ramsay decided the time was right to go. 

‘I just felt that it was one I couldn’t turn down,’ he says. ‘However it pans out here and when it comes to an end, I know I will be significantly better for having had this experience.

‘It’s been everything I wanted it to be so far. I can say safely that even after five months that I feel twice as capable as I would have done had I stayed there.

‘There’s probably never going to be a point where I look back and say, “I should perhaps have stayed at Manchester United a touch longer”.

‘I had a couple of chances to go during the course of Erik’s time, and I’d always taken them to him first. He was a very good person to talk to in that sense. He’s very honest and has also got that mentoring side to him.

‘When this came up, as much as there was an appetite for me to stay, he could see the value in the opportunity.

‘We had a couple of long conversations about it and I was really thankful that he enabled me to go because it was an awkward time in the season for them. I was really thankful from watching over here that it all panned out as it did because I certainly wouldn’t want to have seen it go any other way.

‘I had very good conversations with (ex-football director) John Murtough and Darren Fletcher who was someone I really took a lot from. Both of them could see what I could see.

‘I spoke to the Ineos guys and Dave Brailsford at length. I couldn’t say that there wasn’t a tiny part of me looking at Ineos and thinking I would be a good fit for the way they want to go about things.

‘You can’t look at someone like Dave Brailsford and not yearn for more conversation because he speaks so fluently around high performance. This opportunity has come at that cost, but it speaks to the quality of this opportunity.’

Much was made of Ramsay’s age when the news broke that he was the permanent replacement for Adrian Heath, the former Everton player who had been in charge for seven years.

At 32, Ramsay is 29 years younger than Heath and two years younger than Teemu Pukki, the former Norwich striker who is the most familiar player in Minnesota’s squad to English fans.

‘I’ve never had that before,’ Pukki admits after training. ‘I think it’s quite funny but it doesn’t feel like that when you speak to him or when you’re around him. It feels like he’s older than he is.

‘He’s experienced a lot in football. He’s been at Manchester United and it’s a different world there than it is here. It’s his first job as a manager, but from the first day he came in all the players straightaway knew his background and respected that.’

The age issue is something Ramsay has grown used to throughout a rapid rise up the coaching ranks.

‘It’s a far bigger thing for other people than it is for me. It’s become very normal to me,’ he says a little wearily.

‘I went to Swansea and I was the Under-21s coach when I was 22. I worked at first-team level at Shrewsbury when I was 26. Then Chelsea and Man United. It became a non-thing for me. I’ve genuinely only experienced it one way: if players feel like you can help them, it’s fine. If they don’t, then age is irrelevant.

‘Without being cringe about it, I think of my relationship with the players as being more of a big brother type.

‘You want them to respect you on the basis of what you’re talking to them about and the way you can steer them. The respect isn’t coming from age or seniority or depth of experience, it’s coming from the ability to connect with them. More often than not, it’s a strength rather than a weakness.

‘Obviously you have to manage the closeness well. There have been points in my career where I’ve wanted to keep a healthy distance between myself and the players in order to make sure that boundary isn’t blurred.

‘There are other points where you can as a consequence of age really connect with the players in the way that another coach can’t. It’s never been a problem for me.’

But surely it was daunting going into Carrington at the age of 29 to work with big names like Cristiano Ronaldo, Paul Pogba and Edinson Cavani?

‘I’ve never gone anywhere and been intent on making my mark on day one. It’s always about softly softly, earning people’s trust and respect,’ says Ramsay.

‘Obviously if you’re able to do the work then you continue doing the work. If you can’t at that level, you won’t. I was able to do so over almost three years there, and that was on account of taking it day by day, session by session.

‘With the Under-23s at Chelsea, you were regularly exposed to working with the first-team players there so it was the perfect step to Man United. It wasn’t like I was going from Shrewsbury. So it always felt like a gentle step-by-step journey than a meteoric rise.’

There is something else about Ramsay’s reputation that he feels is rather overblown: the notion that he was specifically employed by United as a set-piece coach.

‘That’s a bit of a false narrative,’ he says. ‘My background at Chelsea was in elite player development which was a big part of my role when I went to United. The stuff around set-plays caught hold far more than necessary.

‘My role was pretty general with that being a strand. I worked with Erik as a coach and was part of the staff delivering a lot of the stuff on the grass. It’s a strange one, I suppose.’

Under the circumstances, Ramsay can appreciate the irony of Minnesota being the best team in MLS at scoring set-piece goals and the worst at conceding them.

His team let in two more from a corner and a free kick as they allowed a 90th-minute lead to turn into a heartbreaking 3-2 home defeat to a Christian Benteke-inspired DC United last week. It was the seventh loss in that winless nine-game run.

After topping the Western Conference in May with 24 points from 12 games, Minnesota were ninth with 30 points from 23 games going into Saturday’s visit of bottom club San Jose.

Ramsay cut an intense figure in his technical area. When Jeremy Ebobisse missed two sitters for the Earthquakes in the first half, he made an early substitution and tactical switch that changed the flow of the game.

An own-goal by Tanner Beason before half-time and a 75th-minute header from Bongokuhle Hlongwane gave Minnesota victory and a huge lift going into the month-long MLS break for the Leagues Cup, a competition that also involves clubs from Mexico.

The sense of relief was palpable. More players will be back by the time MLS resumes on August 24 and the transfer window is open to strengthen the squad, even though Minnesota aren’t one of the big spenders. Ramsay’s team remain in ninth – the lowest play-off spot – but it felt like a corner has been turned.

Did he ever doubt himself? ‘Absolutely not. This period has given me real conviction. It’s relatively easy to be a head coach when everything is going your way. When it’s not going your way, it’s how you handle these situations that define your coaching career.

‘You have to be able to keep things together at these points. The most important thing as a coach is how you deal with that solitude, and the conversation with yourself has to be really purposeful but it has to keep the big picture in mind.

‘This has almost been the perfect blend of experiences so far: we hit the ground running and exceeded expectations over the course of the first 17 games, then we’ve had a really tough run. To have had a very early feel of both sides of the coin has been brilliant for me.’

Not getting carried away with success or failure is something else he shares with Ten Hag. ‘I genuinely live by that: never too high, never too low. This has really shown me that.

‘For the frustration of this period, I’ve actually enjoyed the chance to try and keep this group level. If I hadn’t had this period and left, in some sense you would feel like you hadn’t quite sharpened your tools well enough before you take your next opportunity.’

Ramsay is everything you would expect of the youngest British coach to achieve his UEFA Pro Licence. Intelligent, articulate, insightful. Multi-lingual comes as more of a surprise, especially when you discover how he became fluent in Spanish and French.

‘This is a bit of a tangent,’ he admits before recounting the story of his late father giving up a career in music to become a language teacher.

‘He was a rock and roll drummer in a band in Amsterdam and Germany in the 60s and 70s. It was the resident band on the German Top of the Pops. We’ve got some mad videos which surfaced when he passed away. The apple in this case falls miles away from the tree!

‘I didn’t see that side of him. After he finished all that in his early 30s, he turned to languages and we spent time as a family in France and Spain while he was doing his degree.

‘He taught French and Spanish at various schools, and English to foreign students who stayed with us. Growing up, we had a different nationality in the house every other week. Both my parents were teachers actually.

‘It rubbed off on me and was always a theme to our life as kids. It was really important to my formation as a person but also as a coach.

‘When you look at how modern coaching is going, and the coaches who reach the latter stages of the Champions League, very often they are the guys who can speak three or four languages. It’s really important to connect with a hugely diverse dressing-room.

‘I really appreciated that in my time at Manchester United and didn’t want to lose that in my next role. Cavani and Casemiro, for example, didn’t have a great level of English. With those guys it was Spanish or nothing. That was really important with them and here it is absolutely essential.

‘I’m coaching every day in Spanish. It’s expected of me. I’ve got six or seven Hispanics who don’t speak English. One of the biggest reasons I wanted to come here was that it’s the most multi-national league in the world.

‘I really think a lot of the power of coaching is in language now. There are no secrets in terms of sessions and tactics. Everything is everywhere. It’s who sells it best that will ultimately be most successful.’

Even though he has English parents and was born over the border in Shrewsbury, Ramsay grew up in the mid-Wales town of Llanfyllin and ‘very much put myself in the Welsh camp’.

‘There was a village very close to me with a pub that’s half in England half in Wales,’ he says. ‘I’ve been asked a million times whether I want England to win or lose. I’m very pro England, obviously having worked with a few of the players, but also I’m not one of those anti-England Welsh guys.’

Despite describing himself as a ‘very limited midfielder’, Ramsay was good enough to play for Welshpool in the Welsh Premier League and in the academies at Wrexham and Shrewsbury, as well as captain the Wales futsal team.

But he caught the coaching bug from the age of 14 and went to Loughborough to study sports science. He also began a PHD in psychology. ‘A five-year grind, scraping through, but it’s fallen by the wayside. I’d be amazed if I ever finish it.

‘But I think one of the skills of a modern-day coach, you have a huge support staff of experts and you need to have a certain base level of knowledge to be able to interact with them, none more so than a club like Manchester United. You at least need to be able speak the same language with those guys.’

It’s one of the reasons why Ramsay, who had a six-month stint as assistant coach to former Wales manager Rob Page last year, believes the myth that you had to be a top player to be a top manager has been debunked once and for all.

‘There has been a real turning of the tide. You’ve seen people being much more studious and patient because they know the two are entirely separate.

‘I’ve seen it with guys who suddenly find themselves up in front of a group and it’s very difficult to show the same level of charisma and authority as they did as top players.

‘I’m not saying that one or the other is the best route to take, but I certainly think there is an advantage for making sure it’s a real skillset that sits behind you as a head coach. Now it’s a skillset game not so much a reputation game.’

Eric and his wife Sioned speak Welsh to their young children at home out here in Minnesota. Lili turned one on Friday, Ramsay having missed the start of Manchester United’s US tour last summer to be at her birth.

‘My wife is first language Welsh from up in Anglesey where it’s the norm,’ he says. ‘It’s been a big thing for us, for me to improve my Welsh, because if we came here and didn’t really try at home then they would lose that.

‘Part of the appeal of this whole thing was for us to come away as a family and have a bit of an adventure while the kids are young. We’ve enjoyed that as a little bubble of four and the language has been a big part of that.’

Otherwise, the family have immersed themselves in American life and the community spirit that surrounds Minnesota United.

There is an holistic approach that starts at the top with El-Ahmad, a man who cycles to work, wants to ban the use of plastic bottles and has got the club growing their own vegetables at the training ground. Saturday’s match was Native American Heritage night and featured a ceremonial dance before kick-off.

‘We’ve tried to embrace the wholeness of this thing: the culture, the sport, the city, the family and the club,’ says Ramsay who has familiarised himself with the other professional sports teams in Minnesota.

‘As much as I’m desperate for this to go well, and I’m here primarily for the football, we wanted a life experience. My wife and I have moved every three or four years and we’ve always had to be reliant on ourselves, our little unit, and none more so than in this case.’

Aside from family, is there anything they miss from home? ‘The tea for my wife, for sure. They don’t like kettles here. Chocolate, surprisingly. The chocolate scene in the UK is far better. What did we have flown over recently? Squash. They don’t have cordial. It’s just a mad concept, you can’t find anything that is even remotely a replacement.’

Ramsay admits that MLS not being ‘quite as cut-throat’ as the Championship was another factor in his decision to move to the US. ‘I came here because I wanted to learn and develop out of the limelight that can be really crushing in England for guys taking their first steps there.’

Still, it would be a surprise if we don’t see a coach of his calibre back in Europe some day.

‘I can’t pretend that’s not where I would like to be at some point,’ he says. ‘I can only control so much. I have to try and make the best of every opportunity that comes my way and see where that takes me.

‘I love being on the grass at an elite level. Whether my career takes me on a 20-year journey as a head coach, or whether I move back and forth working as an assistant and a head coach, who knows? At the moment, I’m just enjoying the experience.’