Eric Ramsay left Manchester United at the beginning of March after serving as a first-team coach under Erik ten Hag and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer. By joining Minnesota United FC as manager he became the youngest head coach in Major League Soccer at 32.
Minnesota have enjoyed a decent start to the year — 3W-1L-2D – and they’re currently sat in fourth place in the Western Conference with a game in hand. It’s been an impressive start to the campaign considering star player Emanuel Reynoso has only managed 30 minutes on the pitch.
However, the season’s first three games came under interim manager Cameron Knowles, and Ramsay has explained the meaning of a ‘new manager bounce’ which is something we refer to a lot when covering football in Europe.
“For me, you’ve had what would be described in England as that inevitable new manager bounce where someone comes in and the energy changes, and we’ve probably been the beneficiaries of two of those I suppose,” Ramsay told Taylor Twellman about his and Knowles’ debuts, on the latest episode of Offside (via MLS).
“I will go about things in a way that I feel will benefit the club in the long term.
“So I think it’s keeping that big picture in mind, but also recognizing that I want to be competitive. The players want to be competitive. No one signs up to play competitive sports for long-term process and patience. Everyone signs up to be successful immediately. So it’s sort of grappling with those two standpoints.”
"It's spectacular, isn't it?"
Go behind the scenes of Head Coach Eric Ramsay's first week in Minnesota. pic.twitter.com/xJzjqnwHiF
— Minnesota United FC (@MNUFC) March 21, 2024
Ramsay may be on the young side, but he has been involved in coach for nearly two decades and he was a player himself.
“There was something maybe deep-rooted personality-wise that pushed me that way,” Ramsay explained. “And then I think it also coincided with the fact that coaching at that time was becoming a genuine profession in the way it was seen by associations that we were probably moving past that stereotype of the ex-player turned manager.
“… It is a really established route for coaches now to have come through a more academic sort of career coach type pathway, which was the one that I could see relatively early.”
The manager of Minnesota also admitted that he took coaching inspiration from Jose Mourinho, Brendan Rodgers and Andre Villas-Boas.
“At the time I was 16, 17, 18, Mourinho was coming through, obviously, and establishing himself as a top coach with a background not dissimilar to mine. And Andre Villas-Boas and Brendan Rodgers and those types of guys, I think, would always be reference points for me.”
Mourinho, Rodgers and Villas-Boas all had jobs in the Premier League at one point. I wonder how long Ramsay will be waiting for his first job in the world’s biggest league?
We would like to wish Ramsay and Minnesota the best of luck for the rest of the season.
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