Chrsis Ramsey spent 47 years working in football. In that time he has enjoyed three promotions as a player, helped to develop countless England internationals, and managed in the Premier League.
When you speak to people in the game, Ramsey is one of the most widely respected coaches and technical directors in the pyramid. He has played at all levels, recruited, coached, observed, developed and worked for the FA. In 2019, he was even awarded an MBE for services to football and diversity in sport.
As I sit down with him shortly after the new year, he is not to be found at a training ground, or in the boardroom, but at home. It is a year since he left his most recent job, as Queens Park Rangers’ technical director.
A decade ago, he also spent 206 days managing them, at that time the only black manager in the top flight – a situation which has not changed 10 years on, the position now held by Nottingham Forest’s Nuno Espirito Santo.
“I’ve been doing coaching for a long, long time, I started coaching at 28, 29, I was at the FA in my late 30s,” Ramsey tells The i Paper. “I ended up going back to uni and gained a lot of qualifications, and people used to say to me, ‘Well if you can’t get a job, with those qualifications, you’ve coached international [England U20] football, first-team football, then what chance have we got?’”
Now 62, Ramsey has seen several initiatives to improve representation in the game come and go. Some worked. Others were well meaning but never translated into real change. He believes it is a case of “the right ideas” but “the speed is the thing that’s lacking”.
In the 2016-17 season, English football experimented with its own version of the “Rooney Rule” – the NFL’s stipulation that all clubs should interview at least one person of an ethnic minority background for coaching jobs. But as the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) suggests, “the scheme did not yield the desired outcome, with recruitment practices remaining largely unchanged”.
Ramsey points out: “Every time you put an initiative in and it lasts four years and doesn’t work, that’s four years of someone’s career gone. If that doesn’t work twice, now you’re eight years into it.
“The FA and the Premier League and PFA and LMA [League Managers’ Association] have all put stuff into place which has been good, but obviously the fact is you can’t force people who own clubs to employ people that they don’t want to employ.
“We have to be aware that there is a selective morality that goes on – because people can say the right things, I always talk about people use PC language but it’s PC language without PC action. It’s alright for people to say the right things for that 10 minutes, five minutes, everybody claps, but we want to see the action.”
In the year since he left QPR, he says he has had “two calls”. And while he hopes the football authorities can redress the balance – including the effects of the 50-year ban on women’s football – with the best will in the world, there is still a major problem in the way clubs recruit their staff.
“A lot of clubs, what they do, they have headhunters. The headhunters have no horse in the race in this thing. They’ll have clients that they would want to go into clubs, they don’t need to be aware of the diversity side of it. So therefore there’s another barrier now where we need to educate those headhunters, there needs to be more diversity in what they’re thinking.
“But you would have thought that I would have maybe been headhunted at this stage, especially jobs where there are technical directors or people trying to produce young players for the benefit of the club.
“People might say, ‘Well, people might not think you’re very good’ or ‘People might not think that you’re as good as the people they’ve employed.’ However, if you look at my career, there’s obviously an acknowledgement that I am able to help clubs produce players, nationally and within the clubs.
“So you look at, ‘What is the barrier that’s in front of you?’ And listen, the barrier might be my personality! They might not like me! But you have to also be aware of that.”
This is all just one strand of Ramsey’s career, which will see him honoured at the upcoming London Football Awards, supported by MiQ, for his Outstanding Contribution to Football. There are countless others, not least the role he has played in mentoring youngsters.
At Tottenham Hotspur, he took the most pleasure from developing “the underdog”. Indeed he includes Harry Kane in that category because of the “biasness that sometimes people looked at the game in those days”. The England captain – and Spurs’ record goalscorer – is just one example of a player for whom the patience of coaches like Ramsey paid off.
“People talk about pace and power, and they don’t realise when you are dealing with children that they grow and develop at different times and you have to see the potential in people. Lots of coaches have egos that they want to win games, and when players are not ready, like a Ryan Mason or a Harry or Tom Carroll, Alex Pritchard, that type of player, people don’t tend to wait.
“We were fortunate at Tottenham that we had a philosophy that allowed us to take youth team losses on the chin, rather than looking at them as not succeeding.”
The job Ramsey had at Hotspur Way is a dying art. Few coaches are now in place long enough get to see the progression of a Harry Winks, whom he took under his wing as an under-9 and watched him play for the first team. Or an Eberechi Eze at QPR, who had been rejected by Arsenal as a youngster.
Ange Postecoglou has had little choice but to open the same doors. Spurs’ injury crisis has become so severe that against Hoffenheim, even with teenagers Archie Gray and Lucas Bergvall in the starting XI the average age of the substitutes that came on was just 17 years and six months.
“They’re doing well,” Ramsey insists. “When we were at Tottenham fortunately [development coaches] Les Ferdinand and Tim Sherwood had a good relationship with [first-team manager] Harry Redknapp. Harry played a lot of the young players.
“They’re starting to put youngsters back in the team at Tottenham. The manager has had his hand forced to a point, but a lot of the time you do get your debut through adversity. He’s shown a lot of bravery the manager to do that, and the players are paying him back.”
Ramsey still speaks warmly of every club he has been associated with, remembering the “good people” at QPR who kept him there for close to a decade in different capacities.
“Les Ferdinand did a great job of stabilising the club when they were out of the Premier League and making sure we didn’t drop into League One like a lot of big clubs have done,” he says.
Nobody, least of all Ramsey, knows what is next for him and whether it will be in or out of the game. But in terms of longevity and the impact he has had on so many around him, he remains a true one-off in modern football.
For further information and to purchase tickets to the London Football Awards 2025 at Wembley Stadium on 27 February, visit https://londonfootballawards.org/
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