This year has played out at a breakneck pace for Eric Ramsay.
In January, he was an assistant coach in Erik Ten Hag’s backroom working to restore Manchester United to their former glories. Come March, he departed for a transatlantic opportunity, becoming Minnesota United’s second head coach since joining MLS in 2017. He joined a team that hadn’t lost any of its first four games, and sustained that momentum to reach the playoffs after they missed out in 2023.
Speaking on a blustery November day in Minneapolis, Ramsay has had a relatively mundane past few weeks. His team pulled off a first-round upset against Real Salt Lake in the first round, but three full weeks will have passed between that advancement and their matchup with the LA Galaxy (Sunday, November 24, at 5 p.m. Central). It’s been a rare lull in this high-octane season — and one with several key players away on international duty.
The 32-year-old met with The Athletic to discuss his rapid entry into the MLS coaching ranks, the “three distinct phases” of his first season, what guides his approach to management, veteran Teemu Pukki’s decreasing workload, and much more.
(Jeremy Olson/ISI Photos/Getty Images)
How have you found this first foray into being a senior head coach, and what are the differences between an assistant and head coaching roles?
I’ve always been very intentional about how I build relationships with players, partly because I’ve always had that age question mark hovering over my relationships with senior players. As a consequence of that, I’ve found the transition relatively easy.
I’ve always leaned into my coaching and my ability to help a player develop as being the number one thing that sits between me and them. Other coaches talk about that in completely opposite terms, with it being the personal relationship to focus on first. I genuinely believe that, first and foremost, a player wants to feel like the coach is going to benefit the team — and to benefit them as a football player. I find that if you can do that, then the relationship just comes naturally. Almost to a man with the group that we’ve got now, I feel like I’m in a really good place with them.
There are a couple of guys on the team who are my age and think in a very similar way to me. I’ve tried to make sure that I bring those guys in, that we have a real leadership group. I give players some autonomy as to how the team plays and try to loop them in when it comes to some decision-making. It’s definitely something that I would take forward into any role that I take on in the future.
Minnesota fans celebrate beating Real Salt Lake earlier this month (Jeremy Olson/ISI Photos/Getty Images)
During the interview process, chief soccer officer Khaled El-Ahmad stated the importance of hiring someone who was in ideological lockstep with his vision. How has that dynamic played out since you joined?
I think we’ve naturally fallen into line. It’s been interesting: what this job has demanded from me is that ability to be pragmatic and adaptable. I think this league is one that demands that probably more than most. You’ve got the obvious things around geography and climate which means you can’t only do one thing in one way.
We’ve used more players than any other MLS team. We’ve gone through three distinct phases of player availability. Basically, we’ve almost been victims of our own success earlier on — we did well with a squad that was pre-planned to be thin given the timing of my arrival and Khaled’s arrival. The nature of the early success meant that more players than probably planned were involved in their international teams. Those players went further (in summer tournaments) than expected, and then that misalignment between the European (transfer) window and this window, we were a victim of that as well.
If we’d set out at the beginning of the year and said we wanted the team to play in ‘X’ way, it would have been almost impossible. It would have been an absolute miracle to see real consistency across those three distinct groups, across 36 players, and to see a really cohesive outcome come the end of it.
That’s interesting — I think younger coaches are stereotypically assumed to be strictly adhered to a philosophy of play, a curated system. How do you take your internal influences, ranging from result-obsessed pragmatism and staunch commitment to methodology above all else?
I would say I’ve really enjoyed the necessity — and I do sort of underline that word, necessity — to be pragmatic and adaptable with this group.
I’ve really enjoyed going from week to week and making sure that we are as competitive as possible, and that we’re as well-positioned for three points come the weekend as we can be. I’ve looked at our group, and I felt like we’ve got players that are very goal-orientated — they’re very direct. We’re not a team that’s necessarily cut out for dominating possession week on week.
I feel like over the course of the last 12 games, we’ve found a version of ourselves which is exciting and dynamic. It’s led to the team having more goals than the team’s ever scored over an entire year — but we are also very difficult to beat. We’re very solid, very strong defensively, really disciplined, really well-organized. I feel like that’s a nice blend, and it’s difficult to get a team that is very restrictive in terms of what the opposition is able to create.
We’ve got a really good rhythm. We create a lot of chances. I think that makes, particularly at home, for a really exciting team to watch.
You alluded to the last 12 games, beginning after the team exited the Leagues Cup in the group stage. That elimination afforded you several weeks of training that you didn’t enjoy by arriving after preseason. What did you work on in that span?
When we’ve looked back at statistics over the course of this year, you just find that the whole season is hugely skewed by that middle period. We’ve tried not to draw too many conclusions from that period, in the sense that you felt like there were so many extenuating circumstances wrapped around that it almost renders that exercise pointless.
What this iteration of the team does well is restrict the number of high-quality chances that the opposition is going to get. We were good defensively in the first half of the season, but we were always good value — or bad value, depending on how you look at it — for the opposition getting one or two clear-cut chances. We’ve made some subtle tweaks to the way we press, and some of the detail in how we defend the wide areas has meant that the back line isn’t defending as much as it was.
At our best, we’ve always been very tight from top to bottom, difficult to play through. We now have a better grasp and are more detailed, much more intentional, as to when we start off our pressure. Sitting beneath that now is a team that understands its roles. I’m really confident that, going into Saturday’s game, I know what I’m going to see as a baseline. That, for me, means I can spend the days when we get the group back together talking about the subtleties of the opposition, as opposed to trying to claw together some sense of solidity in ourselves.
We’re talking during another long break, into a third week since you and the LA Galaxy knew you’d face off. I’d imagine it’s been an awkward time trying to sustain momentum without overthinking the matchup.
Yeah, I’ve not enjoyed these two weeks. I don’t think anyone’s enjoyed them in a lot of senses, because it feels like we’ve trained without a lot of purpose. We’ve gone and lost seven or eight internationals. In one sense, it’s been nice, because we’ve tried to keep our training very general and fun. Sometimes what you find difficult — particularly when you settle on a lineup and there are very few injuries, and you’re rolling with a really good form — is that you get a sense of “starters and non-starters.” That is just the nature of our sport. I was keen for that not to continue over the course of this period, so we’ve obviously not wanted to work tactically yet.
We’ve not wanted to talk about Galaxy; we’ve not wanted to talk about the possibility of this player starting or that player starting. In the same breath, it’s then two weeks of just plodding along, I would say. I’m sure the players would feel the same. So, refreshing in one sense, but largely frustrating. It’s an odd dynamic, I’ll say.
Does that short run-up become easier when you play a team that’s so stylistically different in terms of their view of possession?
It’s an interesting one, because they are sort of predictably unpredictable. Even if I had 10 days with the full group, it wouldn’t be that I could nail down the three or four patterns that they will typically execute that are going to cause us a lot of problems.
Their danger lies in the unpredictability of the individuals in the middle of the pitch; Riqui Puig is huge in that sense. He has complete freedom to pop up in any part of the pitch that he would like to, so they’re not particularly positional. It’s then very difficult for you to be really concrete in how you solve every particular situation. It’s much more about how you execute principles, which is something that I talk about a lot, and how typically when we do that well, we can leave ourselves in a really good place.
LA Galaxy’s Riqui Puig (Ronald Martinez/Getty Images)
I also don’t want to underdo what we are able to do with the ball in organized possession. As much as we don’t often have more than 40 to 45 per cent of it, when we use it well, we use it with a really good rhythm. We’ve got players that we can get into positions that can cause real danger.
I would say with Robin (Lod), we have one of the more creative, dangerous, crafty players between the lines in the league. We’ve obviously got Kelvin (Yeboah), Joaquin (Pereyra), Bongi (Hlongwane), (Joseph) Rosales — we’ve got plenty for them to think about as well. I certainly won’t be leaving our group feeling that we’re going to spend 80 per cent of the game defending and counter-attacking, because we can be and will be much more than that.
One big decision you’ve made this season regards your striker depth chart. Teemu Pukki appears to sit third despite being the team’s highest earner, trailing Yeboah and Tani Oluwaseyi for minutes. How has managing that situation gone?
Yeah, it’s been an interesting challenge in that sense, and I’ve approached it as I approach relationships with all the players: I’m really open, I’m really honest with players. I try to make it very clear what the expectations are, how I want the team to play, what the demands are on individuals, positions, and relationships. If players don’t fall into that, then I make it very clear as to why that’s the case.
(Tim Nwachukwu/Getty Images)
I think I have a good relationship with Teemu. I think he’s a really good guy. He’s hit the levels that he has as a consequence of ability, but also of professionalism and work and a real love for being in front of the goal and scoring goals. I’ve really taken that from this year with him, but he’d be the first to admit: it hasn’t been the year that he would have expected, and certainly not the year that probably the club had planned for Teemu.
Managing that hasn’t been easy. It’s not been easy for Teemu. He’s someone who wants to be on the pitch and wants to play, and he’s obviously experiencing a different period in his career. As best I can, we’ve tried to help him with that. I’m sure as we sit here now, there’s still a big contribution left for him in this team for sure.
I don’t think anyone envisages a situation where we’re chasing the goal on Saturday, in which he’s not considered to come on because the ball seems to gravitate toward him. He’s one of those guys: a bit of a magnet for the ball in the box.
Before the 2018 World Cup, Gareth Southgate was in Minnesota for the Super Bowl. He later said that he learned a lot about curating set pieces from watching the Timberwolves, and you’ve also been spotted courtside at NBA games. Have you taken any cues from American sports?
I love watching basketball courtside and being able to appreciate it. The level of concentration from a defensive perspective is insane. I feel like if you could get a group of footballers across 11 players to execute with that level of concentration and detail, you’d have a team that’s almost impossible to beat.
Obviously, in basketball, the level of consequence that is wrapped around each action is so much more than in football. If you’re beaten one-v-one in the middle third, you’ve still got possibly half a pitch and six or seven players to beat before you get anywhere near the action being really consequential. In basketball, any wrong slip is incredibly consequential.
I feel like when I sit courtside and I watch players that dialled in, it’s something I’d love to bottle and give our players to drink. If we could go another level in that sense, that would be impressive.
(Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
I also feel like just being around that sport and talking to coaches, that idea of individual matchups is the essence of sport. I think our sport has become so tactical. Everyone is very concerned about the collective and knitting together the roles of player one to player 11, relative to how the opposition plays, that sometimes you just lose that essence of like, ‘Well, this guy is on fire. Let’s get him the ball.’ We have to try and engineer these 1v1 situations — it’s sometimes lost.
I think that the basics, the essence of sport, are being brought back to my attention by watching some of that stuff.
Since you left Manchester United, “Peak Barclays” has surfaced as a meme, a yearning for less predictable play models. Generally, young coaches are lauded for incorporating data analytics into their planning. Where do you fall between those two extremes?
I’m really keen to not lose sight of what are some of the really important things in sport. I really like the sort of romance in the essence of sport: the moments and the individuals and their strengths. I think, as a coach, I’m much more drawn toward how you knit all that together, and don’t lose sight of what it is that these players did to become professionals. I feel like that’s the art of coaching.
I would consider myself a modern coach, a progressive coach who has a really good grasp of data and sports science, and I can think from one end of the spectrum to the other when it comes to philosophy. I understand the component parts. I understand the mechanism to produce a team that can play in one way and a team that can play in a way that looks very different.
But I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that sport is about individuals. It is about matchups. It is about team chemistry. I also feel like coming to Minnesota, coming to MLS, has given me the chance to play with that a little bit, because there’s no preconceived idea of what I was going to bring as a coach, what the team was going to do. That sort of blank canvas has been good from our perspective, for sure.
It might be an awkward time for this question — because you have one to three games left this season — but thinking ahead of 2025, do you have a sense of how you want to evolve your approach and your system?
I’ve got a really clear idea of how I want the team to look. I feel in the last 10 or 12 games, we are moving much closer to a version of that. What we’ve seen at home over the last three games, we’ve been in a really good place.
I sort of reaffirm what I said earlier in the sense that, at home in those games, the team has been very difficult to beat; really compact, really well-organized, and given away very little. When it’s had the ball, it’s played with a really good rhythm. It’s attacked quickly. It’s created loads and loads of really clear-cut chances. It looked really dynamic, really pacey and threatening at the top of the pitch. I would like to be a more refined, higher-quality version of that team next year. I feel if we can get to that point, then we’ll be a real threat.
English coaches working abroad are inevitably assessed with one eye on the Premier League, especially when your previous employer is Manchester United. Do you think about your personal mid-to-long-term plan?
Not really. Contrary to what people think when they look at my career, I’ve never been desperate to keep taking the next step. It’s just that at each club I’ve been at, it’s gotten to a point where I’m ready for the next thing and opportunities start to arrive. This was one of those, and I assume the next one will be similar.
I’m in no rush to necessarily get back to England. I have no preconceived idea as to exactly where the next step will be, but I’m obviously one that’s open-minded to (an opportunity) that’s not in England.
I feel I’ve opened the world a little bit by coming here, and I’ve really enjoyed the nature of MLS. It’s the most multicultural league in the world, I really wanted to make sure that I continue to cut my teeth in a multilingual environment. I wouldn’t be in a rush to lose that in any way. Of course, we feel like we’ve got real momentum here and we’re onto a really good thing, so I want to make sure that whilst I’m here, that continues to build.
(Header photo: Jeremy Olson/ISI Photos/Getty Images)
