Chris Ramsey: Polishing the strengths

‘People called us mad’

Much of this was before the introduction of the Elite Player Performance Pathway, which now mandates much of these structures. Ramsey and his colleagues at Tottenham were ahead of their time. Working under John McDermott, they devised a 12-year programme to transform the talent pathway.

“We had a good open-minded coaching team. People talk about playing out from the back and all that. Now we were doing that when people were calling us mad, because we were losing loads of games. We did have a developmental philosophy that meant that the individual came first, then the team.”

He explains that the principle was that as players got better, their game understanding also improved, and they also understood the way to win. Before they got to that point, though, Ramsey admits that there were some tough results.

“We had a lot of haters at the time who couldn’t see the vision that we could see,” he says. “You have to always put the player at the centre of what you’re trying to do.”

He adds: “We were pretty sure that we were slightly ahead of the game. John allowed me to lose, whereas a lot of academy managers wouldn’t be doing that because they’d be getting a lot of flack.

“You have to allow [players] to fail constructively in order for them to hone their craft. You doubt yourself when you’re getting beat 8-0 or 9-0. Of course you do. But I was very happy with how I was going to do it.”

Ramsey says that modelling the practice he wanted from his coaching team was key.

“You have to allow [players] to fail constructively in order for them to hone their craft”

“They could see what we wanted, and then they could improvise based on what we wanted the outcome to be,” he says.

“You need a professional alignment. You need people who are going to be compliant disciples of what you are doing. But that’s not taking away their personality.

“I think a lot of coaches get frightened that they have to follow a syllabus because they think it’s going to take away their creativity - but there’s certain things you have to work on as you would do in a school that you would expect the players to know by a certain amount of time…so we put a syllabus into place.”

Ramsey says that regardless of the syllabus being taught and the outcomes identified within one club, a development coach also needs to prepare a player to operate under different managers and different systems: “It’s important that the style doesn’t stifle the player’s ability to go and play for other people.”

He points to Harry Kane, who as a youngster was what he describes as “a technical player…anyone with good technique’s always got a chance with us, and anyone who’s prepared to work hard has always got a good chance with us.” But Kane was not as big, strong, quick or agile as he is now, and Ramsey suspects that if he had been assessed solely on his statistics, he would have been released at the age of 14. Instead, he had a coaching team – including Alex Inglethorpe, Les Ferdinand, Tim Sherwood and Bradley Allen – who had belief in him, even when he was sent out on many loans to gain additional experience.

“He had a lot of people he could go to that would tell him straight, tell him, ‘You should have run in behind’ or ‘You came short’ or ‘You shouldn’t have given that away’,” says Ramsey. “To make people succeed, you’ve got to tell them the truth. Someone like Harry does everything to the T and he does it properly.

“He’s pristine in everything he does. He’s never late. He’s a model pro, but with that bit of maverick about him on the pitch.”

Working from the top downwards

After a decade at Tottenham, Ramsey moved on to Queens Park Rangers – another club where he took on a variety of roles and responsibilities. His new employers knew how he had operated previously and wanted similar results – but quicker.

“The club wanted us to [re]produce what we’d done at Tottenham as regards to getting players in, creating assets for the club. We went there and I don’t think you can ever bring something completely from one place to another. You can bring the bulk of it, but you have to [make it] bespoke for the culture of the club, and how the club are going to be.

“It was a totally different proposition because when we were at Tottenham, we came in from the bottom up. When we went [to QPR], they wanted quicker success with that. So I had to work top downwards.”

He goes on: “You’ve got to develop the coaches, but our ultimate clients are the kids. That’s your ultimate client: the kids and the parents, who drive there four days a week, and devote their whole family’s life to coming to training.

“So when they come training, there must be a focus to where we want them to go to.

“If your performance is good and your players are doing well, then that’s different, but if you are just winning because you put a low block strategy into place and [had a] counter-attack and won the game, good, you were good on that day - but where are your players going to end up in the end?”

Ramsey had a spell at QPR managing the first team, which enabled him to bring through players he had developed. There was a time when seven players who had come through the academy were named in the starting line-up, and Ramsey was confident they would be able to handle this level of competition because he knew their basics were strong.

“People always look at all the fancy things. They don’t realise that coaching the basics and making sure that people are good at the basics allows them to have that little bit of maverickness about them.”

Later becoming QPR’s technical director, Ramsey’s breadth of knowledge across the club’s age groups meant players’ progression was accelerated.

“I could just go to the 23s coach and tell them what to do in order [for] the players to get in the team,” he says. 

“Identifying what the first team needs and how to train it is probably the key to bridging that gap.”

And, of course, he also considered what players themselves needed. That didn’t necessarily mean a smooth journey from under-8s to first team – the kind of progress that he supported Rayan Kolli through. Ramsey gives Eberechi Eze as an example, who enjoyed a successful loan spell at Wycombe Wanderers that caught the eye of QPR’s then-director of football Les Ferdinand.

“He got in the [QPR first] team and then the rest is history for his career,” recalls Ramsey.

Giving feedback and building relationships

Ramsey is now working within the England set-up as professional development phase lead, overseeing the pathway to ensure that players get the right skills and experience to progress to the under-21s and eventually the senior squad.

“It’s looking at how do I help the coaches develop, and how do I make sure that the players get what they need,” he says.

“It is giving the clubs correct feedback [and] support into the [individual development] programs of the players. They don’t have to do it, but as an experienced coach who’s worked with a lot of good players, you’d hope that your feedback would be taken on board.

“I think that we need to give more concise and honest feedback, because the player in the end will thank you for it when they succeed.”

And when he can, Ramsey is still out on the pitch.

“I coach college teams or anybody that will have me,” he says with a smile. “I think doing that tests me as well. And it’s a happy place for me.”

Understanding players and building a connection with them is still something that drives him.

“All the players that I’ve worked with knew that I believed in them and I wanted them to succeed, and that I think they felt that and I would do anything for them to succeed,” he says.

“I think that we need to give more concise and honest feedback, because the player in the end will thank you for it when they succeed”

And fascinatingly, he says that sometimes that means he steps back and allows another coach to take the lead – acknowledging that even after half a century in the game, others might be better placed to help and guide a player.

“I use people as libraries,” he says. “I don’t need to know everything, but if I think you know something that I don’t know, I need to know that, or I need you to help me do it. If I feel that I’m not connecting with a player, then I’ll use somebody else to connect with them, because you’ve got no divine right to be the top person in everybody’s mind and in their heart. So the quicker you can find out how they connect and who they can connect with best and direct that person to them, that’s the best way to work.”