Eric Ramsay took a crash course during an otherwise safe Uber ride from his Minneapolis suburb to downtown U.S. Bank Stadium for the Vikings-Texans game on Sept. 22.

The Welsh coach of Minnesota United and wife Sioned sat in the back seat and viewed YouTube videos of American football on his phone. He was looking for not only the game’s principles but some intricacies, tactics and ways to relate it to the world’s version of football. Then the couple watched the spectacle of their first live NFL game.

“I think that helped,” Ramsay told the Pioneer Press last month. “We really enjoyed it as a consequence of that.”

Ramsay — the youngest coach in MLS at age 32 — has completed a clean sweep of spectating at the four major men’s sports venues in the Twin Cities. He has attended three Wild games and has even gotten behind the mic at Xcel Energy Center to shout “Let’s Play Hockey!” He’s sat at Target Field to watch the Twins and has been courtside at Target Center to see the Timberwolves. He wants to visit the Gophers, too, because the layer of college sports are even more foreign to the British.

“Part of the appeal for coming to the States was to have the chance, particularly in Minnesota, to see the four other big sports up close,” said Ramsay, who is in his first season on the Loons’ touch line at Allianz Field. “There is always something to learn from a coaching perspective.”

In leading MNUFC back to the MLS Cup Playoffs, Ramsay has shown himself to have methodical but also pragmatic approaches to how he coaches his side. He’s studious as the youngest British coach ever to receiver the UEFA Pro License designation in 2019. He’s not afraid to acknowledge what he doesn’t know and is curious to how the other sports might help him in his increasingly tailored application of soccer. He also wants to connect with as many local coaches as possible.

Before coming to Minnesota United, Ramsay was an assistant coach at Manchester United in the English Premier League. As he left Old Trafford, someone passed him the phone number of Wolves coach Chris Finch, who played in England and later coached the Sheffield Sharks in the 1990s.

In April, Ramsay and Finch exchanged text messages, but Finch was busy with his team’s run to the Western Conference finals and Ramsay was navigating his first games in an MLS regular season. Last month, Ramsay said he hopes to connect with Finch and watch a Wolves practice.

“It would be naive of me not to make those links whilst I’m here because for a young coach, or any of our coaches, it’s a really important step to make,” Ramsay said. “… I’m sure there is a hundred things from each of the coaches that you can take from them, just from them as individuals, personality and way they handle the group and their thoughts about high-performance environments.”

More accustomed to other sports offerings being rugby and cricket, Ramsay said hockey and American football have been “alien” to him.

With the Pioneer Press, Ramsay showed he was particularly enthralled with American football, which has a “sort of mythology” around it compared to his form of football. “It’s a game of set plays,” Ramsay said of the NFL. “Basically endless set of plays, endless coordination.”

Ramsay’s curiosity centers on the impressive volume of information that NFL players need to absorb from their playbooks and film sessions and how that level of detail might carry over to soccer.

“It was always a theme on (soccer) coach education courses (to look at) the length of the time that the players are … in the building, the amount of information, the number of plays, the size of the playbooks,” Ramsay said.

Ramsay wants to challenge the “accepted wisdom” that soccer players have a limited capacity for information to use in matches, primarily that they might not be able to remember eight or nine set-play routines or don’t want to sit in a meeting for longer than 10-12 minutes, Ramsay said.

“I think as as a (soccer) coach, sometimes you can be lazy,” Ramsay said. “Because there are some accepted norms that I think American sport challenges a little bit.”

With basketball, Ramsay seeks a “real feel” for how much offense is in the form of scripted plays vs. free play relying on the players’ reads and intuition.

“I think in (soccer), we’re sort of straddling a bit of both, at the moment,” Ramsay said. “You’re seeing teams like (Manchester) City as a prime example of very positional (set-up). You could close your eyes and you know exactly where every single one of their players is going to be at every one point of the game.

“And other coaches are going well against the grain there and trying to give the players more freedom, more liberty, particularly when they reach the final third. So I think those types of conversations are really interesting around those sports.”

During the Vikings’ 34-7 win over Houston in September, Ramsay was texting Loons midfielder Hassani Dotson, who was sitting a few rows ahead of him with goalkeeper Dayne St. Clair and striker Tani Oluwaseyi. Ramsay wanted to know about some players, including receiving star Justin Jefferson.

“The celebrity around it is incredible,” Ramsay said. “There is obviously personality and spectacle and celebration and flair, which you don’t get that in British sport. You’re seeing it more so in the Premier League, but certainly the other sports in England (like) rugby, cricket, it’s much more low-key.

“Every moment possible (in the U.S.), there is celebration, where there is for players to impose their personality on the game,” Ramsay continued. “But it’s not a bad thing in any way. And I think we can take a little bit from that, for sure.”

Ramsay has also tried to take in the overall environment at the other Twin Cities sports venues. While songs often organically rise out of supporters sections at soccer matches in the U.K., American sports are filled with prompts to “get loud!” Or at Vikings games, clap along to the Skol chant.

“It’s just not in the British psyche or personality to be prompted to celebrate or make noise,” Ramsay said. “People will be sliding into their seats finding it really uncomfortable, but it’s just embraced incredibly here. I think it really does contribute to the atmosphere.”