Chris Ramsey is a busy man.
"I do three sessions a day probably," he tells football.london. "I work with the under-23s in the morning or the 18s, then in the afternoon I’ll work with one of them if they do a double session. Then I work with the different age groups in the evenings - last night I worked with the 9s, day before it was the 12s.
"Got to do it, haven’t you? Got to help people fulfil their dreams."
Even so, you get the feeling that if time wasn’t an issue, QPR’s head of coaching and technical director could talk about football - and more specifically youth coaching - until his voice ran out. And he’s got plenty to talk about too.
When Ramsey arrived at the club in 2014, his remit was to help fix one of the club’s biggest problems. It was a source of no little embarrassment that the club hadn't produced a homegrown first-team regular since Richard Langley came through nearly 20 years earlier.
Chris Ramsey issues instructions during a pre-season friendly match between Queens Park Rangers and Dundee United. (Image: David Rogers/Getty Images)
After a short interlude when Harry Redknapp resigned and Ramsey’s project was interrupted by a call to manage the first-team, he got to work on trying to replicate some of the results he achieved in a similar role at Tottenham.
There, Ramsey helped to implement (and he’s careful not to take all the credit for it) a programme that would eventually produce Harry Kane, Harry Winks, Andros Townsend, Ryan Mason and a host of others.
"I've taken the same philosophy but the different dilemma we have at QPR is that we need more rapid success. To get a Harry Winks, it takes 12 years, approximately. We had time then: now we have no time."
That time pressure is broadly governed by the grim practicalities of running a club outside the Premier League elite; partly because of past excesses, QPR must try to use the players they produce out of necessity, rather than some sort of warm-hearted, sentimental indulgence.
"We’re in a financial situation where we can’t go and spend millions on players," Ramsey says. "I'm not saying play all the kids and lose every game, but clubs need to look at the effect of playing a young kid or the guy on £20,000-a-week. If there’s a minimal difference, you've got to save yourself £20,000."
So what’s the best way to bring through quality players? Ramsey thinks one of the key aspects is to minimise the importance of winning games and trophies in youth football. "It depends what you consider winning is. Winning to me is firstly about the individual and performance, and then winning games. Not the other way around.
"Winning the Youth Cup is one thing. But the only thing people are looking at is the end product. The board will say 'You've been here X years, how many players have made the first-team?'
"And you can say: 'X players have made their debuts, and four or five are in and around the squad, which is saving fortunes.' They're more happy with that then winning the youth leagues.
"We've got to get away from this idea of 'We've got to give them a winning mentality.' Because you've either got that or you haven’t. And it depends what that winning mentality is. Is it running around smashing people, or is it knowing your job?"
Not placing an emphasis on winning games presents its own problems, not least dealing with pushy parents who want Little Johnny to win every week, and indeed the potentially demoralising impact on Johnny himself.
"I want to win," he says. "Course I want to win. I don’t watch my team get murdered, but winning at youth football is for the coach. Performance is for the kids.
"The team Harry Winks was in at Tottenham never used to win. They'd get beat 16-0. But if you get a good [senior] player out of that team, who cares what the under-9s did in 2007? If you want to win every week, go to Sunday league football, or the first-team. We’re there to produce individual players."
And should anyone question Ramsey's methods, he has some receipts to offer.
"I'm not saying it’s all down to me," he says, name checking John McDermott, Alex Inglethorpe (now Academy director at Liverpool), Richard Allen, Perry Suckling, Bradley Allen, Les Ferdinand and Tim Sherwood as fellow architects and implementers of the plan at Tottenham.
"If it works with one player, you can say 'He’s good, he was going to make it anyway.' But the players that have come from Tottenham were ridiculous: Harry Winks, Andros Townsend, Ryan Mason, Jake Livermore, Danny Rose, Kyle Walker, Kyle Naughton.
Harry Winks and Harry Kane have risen from academy products to Champions League stars for Spurs. (Image: Stuart Franklin/Getty Images)
"Then you look at Kyle Walker-Peters, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Marcus Edwards. And that’s not even mentioning Nabil Bentaleb, Massimo Luongo, Adam Smith, Jon Obika, Yuri Berchiche, who's at PSG.
"If you go down the leagues, there's Shaq Coulthirst at Barnet, Callum Butcher at Millwall last year. There are loads and loads and loads of players who came through at Spurs."
Either because Ramsey thinks the name is so obvious it doesn't need to be mentioned, or because he's wary of a sneaky journalist looking for a headline, he doesn't even mention Harry Kane in that list. But his name does come up later.
"Alex Inglethorpe always used to say: 'Did you look at the silver medallists?' If you're a gold medallist at 10, where have you got to go? Where is your development coming from?
"You have to look at the people always striving to improve: someone like Harry Kane, always striving to be better than everybody, technically. That type of drive to be brilliant as an individual will lead to good teams."
The main task for clubs like QPR is not quite to school these young players to be technically perfect, but to do whatever they can to make them as ready as possible for the first-team.
"It’s important that the players are versatile. We’ve had five managers in [just over] three years. If you can’t adapt to different managers, and different styles of manager you’re not going to play.
"What we do is work on the ‘growth skills’ that every club needs, whether it be Shrewsbury or Barcelona, and work on the strengths of the player that might attract him to any manager."
The early signs are that it’s working at QPR. Seven academy products made their first-team debuts in the last two seasons, a few before that too. Forward Aramide Oteh scored on his first start recently.
Even with their accelerated time line it’s probably too early to entirely see the fruits of Ramsey’s labour in the Championship, but at the very least it looks promising.
"Last season the youth team came bottom of the league, but we sold Josh Bowler to Everton for £1.3million," Ramsey says. "I think the owners are happier with that than if we won Southern South Eastern Alliance league, or whatever it is.
"I understand that when you get to the first-team, it flips: win at all costs. In youth football, it should always be about the performance."
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