Eric Ramsay got a crash course during an otherwise safe Uber ride from his Minneapolis suburb to downtown USA Stadium for the Vikings-Texans game on September 22.

The Welsh head coach of Minnesota United and his wife Sioned were sitting in the back seat watching American football YouTube videos on his phone. He was looking not only for the principles of the game, but also for certain subtleties, tactics and ways to connect it with the world version of football. Afterwards, the couple watched the spectacle of their first live NFL game.

“I think it helped,” Ramsay told the Pioneer Press last month. “We really enjoyed it because of that.”

Ramsay – the youngest coach in MLS at 32 – brought spectators to a clean slate at the Twin Cities’ four major men’s sports venues. He attended three Wild games and even got behind the microphone at the Xcel Energy Center to yell “Let’s play hockey!” » He sat at Target Field to watch the Twins and was on the field at Target Center to watch the Timberwolves. He also wants to visit the Gophers, since college sports are even more foreign to the British.

“Part of the appeal of coming to the United States was having the chance, especially in Minnesota, to see the other four major sports up close,” said Ramsay, who is in his first season on the line Loons sideline at Allianz Field. “From a coaching perspective, there is always something to learn. »

In leading MNUFC back to the MLS Cup playoffs, Ramsay has shown that he has methodical but also pragmatic approaches in the way he coaches his team. He is studious as the youngest British coach to be awarded the UEFA Professional License in 2019. He is not afraid to acknowledge what he doesn’t know and is curious about how other sports could help him in his increasingly personalized application of football. He also wants to connect with as many local coaches as possible.

Before joining Minnesota United, Ramsay was an assistant coach at Manchester United in the English Premier League. As he was leaving Old Trafford, someone passed him the phone number of Wolves manager Chris Finch, who played in England and later coached Sheffield Sharks in the 1990s.

By April, Ramsay and Finch had exchanged text messages, but Finch was busy with his team’s run to the Western Conference Finals and Ramsay was navigating his first games in an MLS regular season. Last month, Ramsay said he hoped to connect with Finch and attend a Wolves practice.

“It would be naive of me not to make those connections while I’m here because for a young coach, or any of our coaches, that’s a really important step to take,” Ramsay said. “…I’m sure there are a hundred things you can take away from each of the coaches, just from them as individuals, their personalities and the way they manage the group and their thoughts on high performance environments.

More accustomed to the other sports on offer, such as rugby and cricket, Ramsay said hockey and American football were “foreign” to him.

With Pioneer Press, Ramsay showed that he was particularly fascinated by American football, which has a “kind of mythology” around it in relation to its form of football. “It’s a set-piece game,” Ramsay said of the NFL. “A basically endless set of plays, endless coordination. »

Ramsay’s curiosity centers on the sheer volume of information NFL players must absorb in their playbooks and film sessions and how that level of detail might carry over to football.

“It’s always been a theme in (football) coaching education classes (to look at) the length of time players are…in the building, the amount of information, the number of plays, the size playbooks”, Ramsay. said.

Ramsay wants to challenge the ‘accepted wisdom’ that football players have a limited capacity for information to use during matches, mainly because they might not be able to remember eight or nine set-play routines or that they don’t want to sit in a meeting for more than 10 to 12 minutes, Ramsay said.

“I think as a (football) coach you can be lazy sometimes,” Ramsay said. “Because there are certain accepted norms that I think American sports challenges a little bit.”

With basketball, Ramsay looks for a “real feel” for the amount of offense in the form of scripted plays versus free play, relying on players’ reads and intuition.

“I think in football we’re kind of straddling both right now,” Ramsay said. “You see teams like (Manchester) City as a great example of a very positional (setup). You could close your eyes and know exactly where each of their players will be at every moment of the game.

“And other coaches are going against the grain there and trying to give players more freedom, more freedom, especially when they get to the final third. So I think those types of conversations are really interesting around of these sports.

During the Vikings’ 34-7 win over Houston in September, Ramsay was texting Loons midfielder Hassani Dotson, who was sitting a few rows in front of him with goalie Dayne St. Clair and forward Tani Oluwaseyi. Ramsay wanted to know more about certain players, including Justin Jefferson.

“The fame around him is incredible,” Ramsay said. “There’s obviously personality, spectacle, celebration and flair, which you don’t get in British sport. We see it more in the Premier League, but certainly in other sports in England (like) rugby, cricket, it’s much more discreet.

“At every possible moment (in the United States), there is a celebration, where players can impose their personality on the game,” Ramsay continued. “But it’s not a bad thing by any means. And I think we can get a little bit out of that, for sure.

Ramsay also tried to take a step back from the general environment of other Twin Cities sports venues. While songs often spring organically from the fan sections at soccer matches in the United Kingdom, American sports are filled with incitements to “make some noise!” » Or during the Vikings games, applaud to the song of Skol.

“It’s just not in the British psyche or personality to be encouraged to celebrate or make noise,” Ramsay said. “People will slide into their seats, finding it really uncomfortable, but it’s just incredibly embraced here. I think it really adds to the atmosphere.