Miguel Ramírez: "We want the fans to feel proud"

CHARLOTTE – It has been quite the ride for Charlotte FC and head coach Miguel Ramírez leading up to the inaugural home match. What started out as ideas, concepts, and goals is now a 26-player roster and an imminent inaugural home match with a reported record-breaking MLS home crowd of over 73,500 fans.

“Amazing. Awesome as people say here,” Ramírez says with a radiant smile. “It’s the first time that I will have this amount of people behind me, behind us. It’s amazing. The players are really looking forward and they super, super motivated.

“These aren’t just words, these are facts. We are working a lot... we are working a lot. Really early in the morning and until late in the evening. Yesterday we were here for 12 hours, and nobody knows. We want the fans to feel proud, we are doing our best to be competitive on Saturday. We want these people for not only the first game, we want this amount of people every single home game."

Having such an immense amount of fans cheering for the team is going to make it hard for players and coaches to communicate but Ramírez couldn’t care less.

“We rather not be able to hear and understand each other on the pitch, than to be able to hear everything clearly. We rather hear the people, the fans.

“Having all those fans will help to push us when we make a mistake and even when we are doing well they will push us to keep the momentum going.”

We saw the fruits of the hard work the team has put into preparing for the season in the opener against D.C. United, where despite losing the game, CLTFC looked cohesive, competitive, and controlled the match for large segments.

“During the preseason we were establishing the basic principles of positional play. In the first week it was stressful for the players to do certain movements, patterns, or decisions but now it’s \snaps fingers\ like that. Now they don’t panic anymore with certain sequences... We saw examples of this versus D.C., how they solved certain things. They’ve learned and now have the feeling to do it.”

As for the upcoming opponent, international stars Chicharito and Douglas Costa on L.A. Galaxy will get all the headlines but Ramírez is more impressed with the quality of the team overall.

“Not just them [Chichariro and Douglas Costa], they have players that have great technical execution. They have a great rhythm. They are all high-quality players, they as a team have the quality to win MLS Cup. But like every team, they have their weakness that we can exploit.”

The overall sentiment from fans surrounding CLTFC can be boiled down to one word: enthusiasm. For Ramírez, this was always the goal, to fill his players and fans with enthusiasm because ultimately he feels that is his responsibility and one of the few things he has full control over.

“I’m going to get a little philosophical here, do you know the origin of the word enthusiasm? I think it comes from the Greek which means to have a god within. If we are able to generate that within someone, the objective has been completed.

“Generating enthusiasm is in our hands. The final result is no one's hands. In a match anything can happen, you have no control over several things in a match. But generating enthusiasm in the fans, generating enthusiasm in my players, that is my hands, I have control over that.

“Every day I try to generate enthusiasm, is what I try to instill in my players, so that my players can then generate enthusiasm in the fans. At the end of the day, you pay for match tickets to have fun and enjoy yourself. Ultimately, I want the fans to have a great time, to enjoy it [the match] with us, to feel well represented. We want fans at the end of a match to feel proud about their team.”