Chris Ramsey, the Tottenham Hotspur assistant technical co-ordinator and English FA coaching tutor, tells Kevin Azzopardi that his playing spell with Maltese club Naxxar Lions in the early nineties was the “turning point” of his life.

There’s a noticeable change in Chris Ramsey’s facial demeanour as the topic of our conversation turns to his Maltese experience.

At the end of the day, players are so expensive that to develop even one player periodically keeps your youth system going, it keeps it in credit

For much of the preceding 10 minutes, Ramsey, fresh from a work-out in the gym, confidently dealt with questions about a variety of subjects, from his role with English Premier League club Tottenham Hotspur and their approach to youth development to Barcelona’s success and the hype surrounding Lionel Messi.

Ramsey’s voice softens and his eyes brighten up as he reminisces on the years he spent in Malta and the impact his three-year playing spell with Naxxar Lions between 1991 and 1994 had on his life.

It’s not uncommon for foreigners to laud the “friendliness and hospitality” of the Maltese but, by Ramsey’s own admission, his time here shaped his future.

Now a fully-qualified coach, English FA tutor and teacher with a full-time job at Tottenham, Ramsey recently revisited his “second home” after accepting the invitation of the Malta FA technical centre to conduct a two-day clinic for coaches.

“My job is to link the academy with the first team via training methods and making sure that the first team staff are aware of the players that are coming up,” Ramsey said of his current role at Spurs.

“At the moment, I’m the assistant technical co-ordinator to Tim Sherwood. Tim and Les Ferdinand... we work in the department that allows us to have a broad overview of all the players at the club from nine years old to the first team.”

Ramsey, who turned 50 this weekend, has seen enough to forecast a bright coaching future for the two former Spurs stalwarts.

“Obviously, both Tim and Les have great playing experience and are now moving swiftly into the coaching side of things,” he said.

“They’re becoming very good coaches and I can see them in the future being top coaches on benches for teams.”

Like all the leading clubs in Europe, Tottenham Hotspur have been laying greater emphasis on nurturing their own players.

Ramsey was sanguine about the reasons youth development has become such an area of importance for clubs.

“At the end of the day, players are so expensive that to develop even one player periodically keeps your youth system going, it keeps it in credit,” Ramsey said.

“So, if you develop more than one it becomes a very profitable part of the club.”

The desire and pressures at top clubs to achieve instant success is making it increasingly harder for young, homegrown players to break into the first-team squad. Not so long ago, there was the perception that if a player had the talent, he would probably make it but Ramsey doesn’t concur with this view.

“I don’t totally believe that if you’re good enough you’ll make it, you have to be fortunate,” Ramsey observed.

“You have to have the talent but you also have to be fortunate. At the very, very top level, where the pressure to win is so great, is the manager going up and take a chance with the young players... the richer the club the more difficult it becomes.”

Clubs have come in for some criticism in recent years for their obsession with luring the most promising teenagers, from every corner of the globe, to their fold.

The so-called ‘player hoarding’ has been the subject of endless debate but Ramsey believes that the inflated fees for home players have left the club with little option but to scour the world for talent.

“It’s very unfortunate for English football but it’s a necessary evil because the English players cost a lot of money,” Ramsey commented.

“Now we’re one union really, more than before. I think that it’s very important that that happens.

“At the moment we (Tottenham) have a worldwide network, pro-bably not as extensive as some clubs, but we had to obviously be in the market for the best young players around.”

The extraordinary achievements of Barcelona in recent seasons have accentuated the rich benefits clubs can gain from a sound youth development system as the core of the Catalan side is made up of homegrown players.

Ramsey said that Barcelona have been reaping the rewards of their bold decision to invest in youth and their patience in giving their players time to mature.

“The thing is that most clubs would love to emulate that (Bar-celona’s model),” Ramsey said.

“Barcelona had a vision which didn’t come overnight, it took time, but they were prepared to wait. In that waiting, their youth department produced very good players.

“One of the things we have to be clear about is if you’re going to have that opportunity, if you have that brave manager who might lose a few games in order to help the young ones progress.

“That’s very, very rare. It’s ironic that the best club in the world at the moment has produced all its players whereas the great teams of the past, the galacticos, bought players who were already superstars.”

Messi has been at the heart of Barcelona’s global supremacy with the Argentine universally regarded as one of the all-time greats.

Ramsey believes that the hype surrounding Messi is justified but he also hailed Cristiano Ronaldo.

“I think it’s justified,” Ramsey said of Messi’s standing.

“We still have to pay regard to Cristiano Ronaldo who, if Lionel Messi wasn’t around, he would be considered that, so we can’t overshadow his level of stardom.

“But, it’s ironic that they’ve (Barcelona) produced him and waited for him and if you ever see something about his life story, it wasn’t plainsailing... he was a very small boy and needed heavy treatment.

“If he was in any other country, maybe in a place where football is more robust, he may never have got to where he is because at youth level, people are so intent on winning youth matches that maybe Lionel Messi would have been overlooked.”

Since the resignation of Fabio Capello as England manager, Harry Redknapp, the Tottenham Hotspur boss, has been consistently linked with the vacant post.

Ramsey refrained from wading into the Redknapp-for-England debate but was full of praise for the Tottenham boss’s man-manage-ment skills.

“Harry is a very intense and passionate manager about football and the players,” Ramsey said.

“He has a good social understanding of the players and the players give their all for him... he has done that everywhere he’s been.

“Players have spoken highly of how he makes them feel, the confidence gained by his persona.

“I’ve known Harry Redknapp for quite a while because I interviewed him when I was at the FA, maybe 12 years ago.

“The FA have a magazine called Insight, I was the region director of that and West Ham were one of my clubs, so I interviewed Redknapp about his thoughts of the game.

“That was maybe back in 1999 and the players are still talking highly about him now as they were then.”

Turnaround

It seems somewhat surreal that Ramsey’s odyssey to a successful career as a coach educator, youth football trainer and observer began in Malta after he joined the then emerging Naxxar Lions.

Ramsey began his playing career as an apprentice at Bristol City before joining Brighton and Hove Albion.

He played for Brighton in the 1983 FA Cup final against Manchester United.

After a drawn final at Wembley, Brighton lost the replay 4-0.

After spells with Swindon Town and Southend United, Ramsey left England to sign for Naxxar Lions.

Why did Ramsey choose to continue his career in the unglamorous Maltese league?

“One of the things was I had a bad injury when I was playing in England and also, I was a bad businessman,” Ramsey recalled with refreshing honesty.

“I lost any money that I ever had in England, I just lost it. But in those days the game wasn’t as lucrative as it is now.

“Fortunately for me I came over to try and play here. Looking retrospectively now, I met some good people here and it really was the turning point of the rest of my life.

“I played in my twenties and had a typical footballer’s life as regards what it was back then, not so much sensationalised then as it is now.

Fortunately for me I came over to try and play here. Looking retrospectively now, I met some good people here and it really was the turning point of the rest of my life

“Then, in my early thirties, coming to Malta changed my life completely.

“I met Ray Farrugia (Malta U-21 coach), Mr Mike (Zammit Tabona), Alan Zammit, Mariella Grech and Paul Sixsmith... and they all helped me to focus on the coaching and become educated in coaching because it was my first experience.

“I’m now actually one of the people who chooses the badges because I’m a tutor.

“And as regards the education part, Alan Zammit helped me to do that and I went on to obtain two degrees.

“And Mariella... I remember she did a massage course (while he was in Malta) that involved physiology and anatomy. She was at Naxxar and I became a student... I went over and she helped me.

“That was a base knowledge for working in the gym, doing personal training which Alan helped me with. Then going to the university, I had a better understanding of the subject.

“Also one of the things that happened to me... I think it was Ray who had told me that, in order for me to go to university, I had to get tuition.

“I left school at 16. I had no qualifications, so he (Farrugia) pointed me in the direction of the tutor. I had to have one-on-one lessons in the same class as 12-year-olds, 13-year-olds, doing the same things.

“I used to go to Fortina, do the training and then go to the private lessons. And from the private lessons, I went to England and did some exams and passed by one per cent. That’s how far back I was.

“I failed the first one and then passed by one per cent and I got into university... and I’ve never looked back.

“And the biggest thing is the support. I learned a lot here... you experiment a lot and take new things on board. Even when I worked in the Naxxar nursery with people that I can’t even remember now, that was my first training.

“When I came here I had the lowest licence in England and then I started coaching and learning.

“Obviously when you come to a new country, there’s also a source of desperation as well because you know that you don’t want to go back to England... you like it here, you like the people. Everybody is treating you with the respect that you deserve and you fight to stay.

“This is a holiday place, Malta.

“It’s quite easy to come here and get dragged into this holiday thing.

“It really did change my whole life being here.

“It was the best time because when you have a catalyst that changes your life from being a bankrupt ex-footballer with a bad back and bad knees to becoming a well-educated person with new life experiences from working with the top players when I coached the England youngsters with the FA, to having experiences of being a manager in the football league and in America and giving lectures at universities.

“Now I’m a qualified school teacher as well as being a sports scientist.”

The support and respect he received from his Maltese friends were not the only things that forged a special bond between Ramsey and Malta.

“I love history and Malta has a history that people don’t perhaps even realise,” Ramsey added.

“When I talk to people, they say to me ‘oh Malta is a nice place’ and I say ‘listen you don’t even know because you come here and you see the obvious’. People don’t realise about the cuisine, about the siestas, the 365 churches. When you’ve lived in the very fabric of it... I don’t know if they still do that here but when I was here, we had siestas.

“It was funny, when I went back to England, every afternoon I used to fall asleep. I couldn’t get used to it.

“We know that life changes as regards big cities and that you have an influx of different people that come to your countries and there’s different proce-dures that have to happen and obviously now we’re in the EU.

“But, when you go back to England and come back to Malta and you see the innocence of the country where you can walk down the road and you’re not stressed all the time... it makes you relax.”

In working his way up the coaching ladder, Ramsey has also knocked down racism barriers and championed the cause of black players and managers to the point that, in 2008, he was named among the 30 most influential black people in football by ‘The Voice’, Britain’s leading newspaper for the black community.

He admits to encountering a lot of racism issues during his career, both as a player and coach.

“Lots... lots and it’s well-documented around the world that it’s very difficult for coaches of ethnic minorities to get on,” Ramsey said.

“We know that there have been significant worldwide changes in what’s gone on but one of the things is that you can’t control when you’re born.

“As a player, there was a pioneering part of my life playing in the seventies and eighties when you’re now opening the doors for the people that are coming in behind you.

“Unfortunately, I’m probably going to be in another pioneering situation as regards opening the doors for the managers that are coming behind me. But someone, or some people, have to be in those pivotal times in history.”

Ambitions

Although Ramsey has been revitalised by his new role at Tottenham, he openly admits that he would like to “have another go” at first-team coaching.

“At the moment, I’m happy working with Tim Sherwood and Les Ferdinand,” he said. “They re-kicked my career after five years of doing the academy where you get to a point where you’ve done what you can do and mentally it becomes a little bit stale. Moving into this new role, which I feel is a role that I was built for, I’m enjoying it.

“But, coaching is not as lucrative when you’re training young lads as it is when your neck is on the block.

“Obviously, the older you get, you come to a point where you have to decide which way you want to go because you have to start thinking about your family and the rest of your life.

“What I don’t want to do is to be sat in my rocking chair, thinking to myself I should have given it another go. You don’t want to get to your sell-by date and not having had a go.

“I’d say that probably my fire is more to be in a support role than as the head person. I think I’d be very good in supporting someone because I’m very hands-on and I like the coaching side.”