Frank Lampard must have so many questions. True, he has always liked to project himself as more of an answers kind of guy but the human soul is deep and dark and the silence comes for us all. Even he must be sitting there today, in the precious solitude of a weekend when Chelsea don’t have a match, asking himself some of the big ones.
Questions such as, why is Frank Lampard still the Chelsea manager? There’s a starter for 10. When all comes to all, what’s he doing there? A chap has to stay busy, it’s true. But there’s got to be a better way than this.
The temptation, as always, is to ascribe Machiavellian motives. Rightly or wrongly, Lamps has always carried the distinction – rare among the general coverage of footballers – of not being thought of as a thicko. The merciless tabloids would find all sorts of ways of telling the world that your Beckhams, your Rooneys, your JTs and all the rest of them were dense as tinned corned beef. It was never that way with Lampard.
No, Frank was the smart one. And not just smart but connected too. He would breezily mention that he knew David Cameron and had a lot of respect for George Osborne, long before they came to power. There was even a front page splash in 2015, as his playing career wound down at Man City, suggesting the Tories had tapped him up to run for the safe seat in Kensington. But even then, he was much too canny to try to become a jobbing MP. The pay-cut alone would have horrified him.
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So when he’s been striding up and down the line as interim Chelsea boss these past few weeks, the cynical assumption has been that Frank has a plan. That he has gamed this out. He knows that the current unpleasantness is just a temporary dip. Lampard was a Chelsea player before Roman Abramovich bought the club, remember. Very few figures in world football have had a closer view of the sheer unanswerable buoyancy that vast injections of cash guarantee a club.
That, in a nutshell, is what most people presume Frank Lampard is counting on. Chelsea spent more money in January than the 78 clubs who make up the top divisions in Spain, Germany, France and Italy combined. Seventy-eight! You could put a ChatGPT hologram of James Corden in charge and some combination of those Chelsea players would eventually figure out a way to rise back up the table.
“People will make a lot out of this season for Chelsea,” he said after the beatdown from Real Madrid during the week. “Because we’ve had so much success [in the past]. The reality is, this club’s going to be back.” It wasn’t a call to arms or a burst of puffed-up bravado. Top-line football is depressingly straightforward. Trophies follow spending. Chelsea will get theirs before long.
Given that everybody knows this, well of course Frank answered the call to fill in until the season. Obviously he did. Anything for the club that made him (and vice versa, he would no doubt think). And if one win led to another and he gave the power-brokers at the top of the club a decision to make, then so be it. Who wouldn’t take the opportunity to slide into that line of succession and see where it got him?
Problem is, this ignores a fundamental truth that Lampard must by now know in a deeper and far more intimate way than anybody in the game. He is not good at this. Time and again, he has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he doesn’t have the qualities needed.
He failed at Chelsea first time round. He failed at Everton. He is failing now again. He must know that whatever it is the top managers have, he is lacking in it. That’s why it’s such a baffling ordeal for him to be putting himself through. He’s a wealthy man. He’s going to have a great life. There’s no good reason for him to choose this kind of humiliation.
The question isn’t just for him, though. The club itself have to be asking it too. Why is Lampard still the manager, exactly? His record since taking over 16 days ago is played four, lost four, scored one, conceded seven.
With the skills and doggedness of a sherpa, he has guided them out of the Champions League and into the mid-table dead zone, wherein the season still has six weeks left but Chelsea have nothing to play for. They won’t make Europe, they won’t get relegated. They’re a non-team for the rest of the season, an unclub. With an unmanager.
Graham Potter was sacked at the start of April. Mauricio Pochettino is apparently the favourite to take over – he has been out of work since last July. The other names that have been in the mix are Julian Nagelsman (available since mid-March) and Luis Enrique (unemployed since the end of the World Cup), although both have seemingly gone cold on the idea. Maybe they were afraid Todd Beohly was thinking he’d do the same as he did with the players and just hire them all.
Whoever Chelsea pick needs to start yesterday. There is much to be done. The new guy has to work out what the hell he’s going to do with the squad. The high comedy of Thiago Silva telling the world that the dressingroom isn’t big enough for the number of players they have tells its own story.
The next manager is going to have to start sizing up who he has, who he needs, who he wants to get rid of. You’d have thought it would make far more sense to do that in the seven games they have left than to come at it cold in the summer. Apparently not.
No, as of now, Chelsea seem intent on keeping Lampard doughtily in the gig as the season fizzles out around them. And in a way, it’s heartening. Football lives and dies by numbers and analysis in everything it does now, a sport entirely ruled by statistics, its every decision fed through the algorithm.
Lampard as Chelsea manager mocks all logic, on all fronts.
Hallelujah.
