The shipment of Eric Ramsay’s possessions must have hardly made it to the West Midlands in time. After leaving Minnesota United this MLS offseason, his era in charge of West Bromwich Albion lasted just 44 days, during which time the Baggies played nine games, and won none. The club couldn’t afford to be patient; not while perched just one point above the drop zone in the Championship. Ramsay was sacked on Tuesday.
In one sense, this is business as usual in the English system’s second tier. Ramsay is the 11th coach to be sacked, to resign, or part by mutual consent since the 2025-26 season commenced, and the league’s 12th mid-season change when counting Rob Edwards’ move to Wolves. One level below, League One has seen nine such changes; League Two has undergone seven. As Ramsay himself said a year ago: “getting managers sacked is a bit of a national sport.”
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And yet, Ramsay’s dismissal restarted a specific discourse, summed up most bluntly on Talksport by Charlie Austin, the veteran striker who spent 18 months with West Brom and now plays for Hungerford Town. Asked why teams are hiring “these MLS American coaches,” Austin quickly retorted: “I think people have watched Ted Lasso and got carried away if I’m honest.
Related: Bob Bradley, Wilfried Nancy and the uphill battle for MLS coaches in Europe
“I don’t get it. For a club like Celtic, what they’ve done with Wilfried Nancy. It’s painful. That appointment that Celtic made could cost them a title up there, and West Brom [hiring Ramsay] could cost them Championship football.”
Of course, neither Nancy nor Ramsay are American. Born in Shrewsbury and raised in Llanfyllin, Wales, Ramsay had no pro playing career of significance, instead coaching in the youth ranks of Swansea City and Chelsea before joining Manchester United in 2021. There, he worked under Ole Gunnar Solskjær, Ralf Rangnick and Erik ten Hag. His multi-lingualism is credited for helping Casemiro integrate, with some describing him as a “secret weapon” for the club.
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Nancy was born in Le Havre and played in France for a decade before moving to Quebec in 2005 and launching his coaching career soon after. He led CF Montréal to its best stretch since Didier Drogba left, then led Columbus to an awe-inspiring MLS Cup win balancing effectiveness with aesthetics. Yet his move to the UK went similarly to Ramsay’s: eight games in charge of Celtic, two wins, and just 33 days in total.
Their paths to this point were significantly different, but now Nancy and Ramsay are linked in the eyes of many: two MLS managers who couldn’t cut it on their side of the Atlantic.
Why did this happen? It may be helpful to start with what each coach was seemingly expected to do: win immediately, or else. This is an obviously ill-fitting task for these specific coaches, coming from the specific league they came from.
Nancy and Ramsay succeeded in MLS thanks to some of the league’s most crystalized tactical ideologies. As Thierry Henry – who appointed Nancy to his backroom staff in Montréal and whose departure led to Nancy’s first senior head coaching role – told me in 2024: “Wil is very important because he will live and die by [his philosophy] … At the end of the day, when he finishes a game, it’s very important that he doesn’t talk about the result. He talks about the how.”
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Ramsay, meanwhile, turned Minnesota United into “the most aggressive set-piece team in the world”. Thanks to injury plagues and international duty, the Loons kept a tight defensive shape and attacked primarily through transition phases and dead-ball scenarios. While he’d openly pined for a chance to have more control over the ball, that philosophy will generally play in a relegation scrap. What West Brom overlooked, seemingly, was Ramsay’s preference to play with a five-man defense, a problem considering their squad’s relative thinness at the back.
And then there’s the structural issue. Thanks to MLS’s spring-to-fall calendar, both coaches arrived midway through their new team’s season. “NancyBall” takes time to execute; so too does embracing a bus-parking kayfabe. Yet neither coach had a pre-season to install these ideas, and neither destination was in much of a position to be patient at the time of their arrival. Should we blame the managers for saying yes to an advancement opportunity, or the club hierarchies for offering it to them regardless of their chances of success?
Related: MLS’s calendar flip is coming. Clubs are already planning how to exploit it
In stark contrast to the Scottish or English league systems, MLS’s lack of relegation and relative parity among teams permits plenty of runway for managers who want to establish their ideologies. In time, sometimes, those ideas work.
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“You get an element of patience,” Ramsay told the Guardian last January. “If you look at it, the lifespan of a manager in MLS versus the Championship is significantly longer. I’m sort of out of the spotlight that young British coaches would be in at any level if they took a job [in English football]. You get to develop some of the things that are really important in a coach’s trajectory. You’re doing it with a sense of stability.”
It’s a refrain we’re hearing more stateside, most recently after the Colorado Rapids hired Matt Wells. The 37-year-old Englishman joined in December, having been on Tottenham’s first team coaching staff under Ange Postecoglou and Thomas Frank.
“I’m a bold person, and I also look at other people – obviously Eric [Ramsay], but there’s other coaches that are coaching in different leagues across the world, the likes of Robbie Keane and Liam Rosenior, coaches I really, really respect,” Wells told the MLS website, just before Rosenior’s move from Strasbourg to Chelsea. “I actually love the fact that they take a different pathway. They don’t take the easy option just to go to the Championship. I think the rate of development I’m going to get by moving here is going to be far accelerated.”
Perhaps someday, Wells will be the next coach bandied about for a job in England or elsewhere in Europe. Whenever that day comes, for him or another MLS peer, Nancy and Ramsay will be cited as cause for concern, just as Bob Bradley and Jesse Marsch were before them.
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Or maybe not. The context will radically alter next summer, when MLS flips its calendar to play its seasons from late summer to spring – the same as Europe and much of the world. A coach wanting to finish the ongoing season with his MLS side can do so and swiftly relocate with the promise of a full pre-season ahead. Time will tell whether that prospective employer will be able to drown out the anti-MLS groans bound to accompany their rumors.
But in the event of such an appointment, they’ll hope to enter a sporting structure with a clearer vision and more capacity for patience than Nancy or Ramsay enjoyed.
