Ken Ramsden (1945- )

Further reading

Ken Ramsden is the current Club Secretary at Manchester United. He has been Secretary since 2007 and is due to retire at the end of the 2009-2010 season.

Ken Ramsden grew up in close association with Manchester United. In the 1950s, both his mother and his aunt worked at the club. (He tells of how, after washing the kit of the Munich generation, his mother and aunt were then called upon to polish their coffins, as the club gymnasium was turned into a temporary morgue.) Ramsden began work at Old Trafford in 1960, aged just fifteen. He worked as an office junior at the direction of the then Secretary, Les Olive. He has since performed a number of club roles, including that of Assistant Secretary to the previous Secretary, Ken Merrett. In the late 1980s he helped compile and edit two volumes of the Manchester United Official Year Book. As Secretary, Ramsden oversees the administation of the club. He is particularly responsible for the arranging of fixtures (representing the club on the Premier League Fixtures Working Party), the registering of players, and the organisation of particular projects, eg trophy presentations. In 2008, he was heavily involved in the arrangements that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Munich air-disaster. Each match-day, he oversees the large team necessary to ensure that home games run smoothly.

Ramsden is just the fourth Manchester United Secretary since the second world war, following Walter Crickmer (1926-1958), Les Olive (1958-1988) and Ken Merrett (1988-2007). His successor is to be John Alexander, currently the Club Secretary at Tottenham Hotspur.

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