Minnesota United opens Year 2 under laser-focused, ambitious young coach Eric Ramsay

Who is the face of Minnesota United’s franchise? The coach? The best player? An executive, even?

There’s no one consistent answer, as with most other Minnesota teams. Cheryl Reeve is the coach, president of basketball operations and all-around icon for the Lynx. The daily nature of baseball, and Rocco Baldelli’s daily availability, make the manager the most prominent person with the Twins.

Anthony Edwards is such a big personality and star that he’s become the face of the Wolves — which Kirill Kaprizov might be in St. Paul, too, except for the barrier of his still-developing English skills.

As the Loons get ready to open a new season Saturday at LAFC, they are part of a sport in constant flux.

Soccer is traditionally more like college sports. Your typical long-serving soccer manager is more of a P.J. Fleck-type figure than anything, a constant lightning rod among an ever-changing roster. Even in the days of the transfer portal, the average tenure of a soccer player on a single team is probably shorter than the average tenure of a college athlete on their college team.

Eric Ramsay coached Minnesota United for the first time 343 days ago, in his first game as a top-level coach. The Loons went 15-12-7, finishing sixth in Western Conference. They upset Real Salt Lake in the first round of the MLS playoffs before losing to the LA Galaxy.

With all that plus a normal offseason now under his belt, it’s fair to ask: How long might Ramsay be around to be the face of this team?

When Ramsay was hired, few in Minnesota knew much about him. He was just 32 then, the youngest coach in MLS, and his highest-profile role had been as a first-team coach at Manchester United — one of the world’s biggest clubs, but not the sort of role that made him all that well-known, even in Britain.

Despite his youth, he had nearly two decades of coaching experience under his belt. He started at age “14 or 15,” in his telling, coaching younger kids in his Mid Wales hometown of Llanfyllin — a village of 1,500 people that was “sort of a sporting hub” for even smaller towns nearby, since his town had the local high school.

So if you grew up in greater Minnesota and attended a hyphenated high school, or one that was named after the county or has “Area” in its name: Eric Ramsay understands where you’re coming from.

After college, he went straight into working in the Swansea City academy, just as the Swans were turning their club around and reaching the Premier League. “It was a dream first job for me,” Ramsay said. “I was working with U-18s in the daytime, coaching the little kids in the evening — it was just lots and lots of time on the grass.”

From there, he went to his boyhood club, Shrewsbury, where he managed the academy, and got himself on the coaching ladder — first working with the under-23 team at Chelsea, and then moving into a first-team coaching job with Man United.

It is the résumé of a man who is hungry to learn, who loves coaching, and who wants to keep developing his own skills. As much as anything, that’s why he’s in Minnesota; he’s managing a team that includes players from every continent except Antarctica, in a league that’s a melting pot of every soccer culture from around the globe.

It’s the ideal learning environment for a young coach, one who wants to broaden his horizons beyond the sometimes-myopic British game.

He comes across in person as unshakably engaged, always interested, never distracted. Spend a few minutes in his company, and you’ll understand how he has learned four languages, and still found time to land a top-level coaching job half a world away from home.

His interests are broad enough that, when the conversation briefly touches on the hit soccer documentary “Welcome to Wrexham,” he enthuses not about Wrexham’s rise on the pitch, but about the positive effect it’s had on the overall adoption of the Welsh language.

It’s too bad he’s British, and already finished with schooling; otherwise he would be almost certain to be named a Rhodes scholar.

The Loons might not have one single obvious on-field candidate to be the face of the team. Some of the faces to know:

Michael Boxall: The captain is the longest-tenured player by far in the team’s MLS history, and the only one to see the field in every one of the team’s eight seasons. While the New Zealand native is a fine captain and a leader by example, he doesn’t have the Edwards-like exuberant personality, and center back remains a position that’s best appreciated by purists.

Dayne St. Clair: He’s the team’s biggest personality, and if every game ended with a penalty shootout like last year’s playoff games against Real Salt Lake, he’d be the face of the team. Ramsay calls him a “showman,” and his celebrations during the shootouts with RSL were iconic team moments — but it’s difficult, as a keeper, to become a true superstar.

Kelvin Yeboah: Center-forwards are the biggest stars in soccer, and nine goals in 12 appearances have a way of making any player into a household name. Yeboah was the player the Loons sent to league media day this year, and he’s not short on personality — but he hasn’t even been with the club for half of a season.

Robin Lod: He was the team’s All-Star last season. He’s been with Minnesota since 2019, he’s got an iconic goal celebration, he’s the franchise’s leading scorer in the MLS era … and the Finn is so retiring, so Scandinavian, that making him the face of the franchise would seemingly put him in active and ongoing discomfort.

Bongokuhle Hlongwane: He’s led the team in goals two seasons in a row and he has a magnetic, joyful personality — he’s just not all that comfortable speaking in English, a victim of the language barrier. It’s the same thing that hamstrings Spanish-first players like Joaquín Pereyra and Joseph Rosales.

Tani Oluwaseyi: He has the temperament to be a star; watching him interact with kids at the Loons training ground last season was a joy. The challenge for him now will be playing well enough to stay in the lineup for Minnesota and for Canada, with the approach of next summer’s World Cup.

Even though Ramsay’s yet to hit one full year of service, Loons fans are already wondering: How long will he stay?

Just this week, bookies in the UK briefly made him the betting favorite to take the managerial job at Swansea City. With every success he has here, there will be more and more interest from elsewhere.

Ramsay, for his part, says he’s focused on the longer term. “I think I’m still in that stage of my career where I could have, prior to this, made decisions that weren’t that sensible for the longevity of my career,” he said. “You can’t survive many scars, I don’t think, as a manager. So I feel like I want to make sure that whenever the next step comes, I’m as well prepared for that as possible.

“I feel like this is a perfect context for that. I feel like we’re growing, things are evolving, we’re improving. I like the people that I’m working with. We’ve got a good staff, we’ve got an evolving group of players, and we’ve got a stable environment — and it’s a really good club to work for.

“In that sense, I think if I was to sort of craft the conditions [for myself], it wouldn’t be far off this. So I won’t be throwing that away for anything cheaper, for sure.”

The truth of American soccer, and maybe soccer in general, is that there’s always another rung on the ladder. Every player and coach aspires to the top, and for all but a handful of teams in the world, there’s always another step up, above where they are. And so if the Loons and Ramsay keep having success, there will be other interest, from bigger and more glamorous teams.

It’ll happen someday, for Ramsay. But maybe not right away. “I’m in no mad rush to take my next step,” he said. “People will probably look at the way my career has gone and think that I’m always clawing for the next step. I haven’t really been, I’ve just been focusing on what’s happening day to day — trying to make sure that this is as good a place as possible, and then I’ll see where that takes me.”

3:30pm Saturday at BMO Stadium

TV: Ch. 9, FOX Deportes, Apple TV+, MLS Season Pass * Radio: 1500-AM

Thanks to the postponement of the Inter Miami-NYCFC match, the Loons and LAFC will now kick off the 2025 MLS season. LAFC (19-8-7 last season) is the defending Western Conference champion, and opened its yearly slate with a 2-1 loss to Colorado in the CONCACAF Champions Cup last Tuesday night — a game that was played in below-zero wind chills. Minnesota (15-12-7 in 2024) is coming off a fifth playoff berth in six seasons, highlighted by two playoff wins against Real Salt Lake, both on penalty kicks. The Loons will be missing defender Jefferson Díaz, who is suspended after a red card in the season-ending playoff loss to the LA Galaxy.