"Honestly, and I say this with no bitterness at all,
there were players who were … well, fat." Then he laughs and adds: "They were sedentary."
"A sportsman's physical condition has to be impeccable: your body is your living. A runner is like this," Ramos continues, raising a skinny little finger. "You can't live like the man on the street who's had dessert or cake.
If you eat a cake, you're putting in diesel; a sportsman's got to run off super. A sportsman who makes, say, €6m and drinks and smokes and eats. It makes no sense at all."
And so Ramos,
who faces Spurs as Dnipro Dnipropetrovsk manager in the Europa League on 20 October in Ukraine, began.
"A lad who's 22, 23 and has cash might think: 'This guy's not telling me what to eat.' We trained not far from a McDonald's and we'd see them in there eating hamburgers, drinking Coke but you explain and they understand. 'This is your ideal weight, the percentage of body fat.' I can't go to their houses to watch their eating but we could train morning and afternoon and weigh them. If you're not in shape, you don't play and with work the team started improving."