Frank Lampard opens up on trouble at Everton and Chelsea, life as manager, impact of mum’s death

Frank Lampard opens up on trouble at Everton and Chelsea, life as a manager, and the impact of his mum’s death with Steven Bartlett.

It’s fair to say that the 45 year old has faced difficulties while in his recent stints of his managerial career, while battling with ‘bar-lowerers’ that dragged down standards at the club.

He was axed by Everton in January of this year after a poor run of form left the club engulfed in a Premier League relegation battle for the second season in a row before Sean Dyche took over a clinched a tense 1-0 win on the final day to keep the club up.

Lampard opens up on that, along with his time at Chelsea, originally appointed at Stamford Bridge in the summer of 2019, struggled and was sacked in January 2021.

He later returned as interim manager after Graham Potter’s dismissal, but could only win just one of Chelsea’s remaining 11 games.

0:00 Intro
02:34 How are you doing?
06:36 What shaped you?
11:44 How did that shape your relationship with work?
15:38 Fear of failure
20:11 The decision to stay in football
24:34 Imposter syndrome
26:53 How hard is it to be yourself as a coach vs copying successful coaches?
29:43 Do you think you jumped into high manager roles too soon?
33:40 What do you think makes a great manager?
37:31 What are you like as a manager?
39:25 As a leader what are you working on?
44:20 Managers these days never seem to last very long…
48:59 The standards at Chelsea just weren’t there
55:02 One of the issues was…
01:04:13 What would have had to happen to avoid Chelseas bad culture?
01:07:21 What was going through your head when you go that call?
01:12:33 Do you regret taking the job?
01:16:53 How do you keep family life and work life separate?
01:19:30 The hardest moment in your career
01:21:55 Your mothers passing
01:34:41 Do you talk about your emotions normally?
01:37:59 Whats the future like for you?
01:45:07 A message for the Chelsea fans
01:47:39 Why is Mason Mount leaving Chelsea?
01:50:00 The last guest’s question

Talking about on the challenges that he has faced in this respect throughout his managerial roles to date, he told The Diary Of A CEO Podcast: “If you’re going to make a mistake in a game, I’ve got no problem with that. If you’re not going to run for your team-mate or work through the week, with an idea that when I train on Monday that’s got to have a direct relation to what Saturday is going to look like, I probably can either get upset with the player or distance the player.

“When you’re working with a group, you have to be careful of that one because not every player has your mentality. So you either have to try and bring them up to the party or, if not, they’re going to have to not be there if you’re going to have success. You have six or seven players where you know what you’re going to get every day: they’re going to train, come in and be active every day. You’re going to have the middle group and the ones saying ‘I’m just coming to training’ or ‘I’m a bit sore today’.

“The bar-raisers can take some time to raise the bar, but the bar-lowerers can get you very quickly. That negativity can slip in and be really contagious. In football, winning is everything, and that is obviously relative to if you’re Manchester City or Everton. Everton will win 35 per cent of games at best at the moment, and you know that. You know there will be 65 per cent of weeks that aren’t that great. The bar-lowerers can lower that quickly. Whereas if you can get the bar-raisers to take control, you can get there.

“The most important person at a club is, in my opinion, is the owner,” he said. “It’s about the structure at the top as they set the tone financially and on recruitment. You will only be as a good as the players you recruit. When I finished my first season at Everton, we just stayed up by the skin of our teeth and he [Moshiri] rang me to say congratulations but ‘Frank, don’t rest. 80 per cent of your work for next season will be done in the next month’. It was recruitment. 20 per cent will be what you do next year and 80 per cent will be bringing the right players.”

Frank Lampard talked about behind the scenes at Chelsea.

“I’m doing everything I can in this job to try and improve but I knew behind the scenes there were a lot of things,” he said.

“When you lack those basics, it’s really had to get where you want to get to, and as I say there is an understanding at the club that that has to change now.

“The biggest thing about the standards thing was the size of the squad and the motivation of players that you’re not going to play,” he continued.

“In football, that’s a challenge with 20 players which is a modern squad. But Chelsea’s got very big, to the point that I can say, and I’m not criticising that player for dropping standards but I want to try and get something out of him.

“I would try but when you kind of look at it you go, ‘Yeah but he’s had this for a long time where he’s not playing so he’s not being competitive with that player who is playing, so that player is pretty comfortable too because he’s not pushing him’.”

“And at the minute for whatever reason there’s a transition of maybe new ownership… You can’t have success without that team spirit and togetherness. But when I got there I could just see that the spirit and togetherness was not there.

“You have to train elite to be elite, but at Chelsea when you did that you’d have to go ‘right, if I want to really focus on the 10 or 11 for tomorrow, that means I’ve got to have like 18 players over there’ and you kind of saw the body language of some of them, and they were like, ‘Again?’, because they have been having it all season.”

He also spoke on the death of his mother, Pat, in 2008 following a battle with pneumonia.

He said he was “zombie” for the following year in which he was drinking more than usual and “not right” until he met Christine Bleakley.

(Picture – Baby Frank, his mum Pat and dad Frank Senior)

Discussing his ongoing battle with grief, he admits: “That is the one time I have been challenged to the extreme with mental health.

“I was a mummy’s boy growing up. I had a reliance on her and when I got older I’d panic like, ‘What if mum wasn’t there?’ I was 29, it was very sudden, I was in a hotel we used to stay at pre-game, we were playing Wigan in the evening. I got a call from my sister telling me she’d fallen ill and going to hospital.”

Pat went into intensive care for a “week-long process” and after at first showing signs of improvement in her condition, she suffered a brain haemorrhage and passed away.

At this time, Lampard was in between two Champions League semi-final fixtures against Liverpool, the second of which Lampard scored in, and sent the Blues into the final for the first time in the club’s history.

“Mum was getting a bit better, then we got a call saying she’d passed away, she’d had a brain haemorrhage,” the ex-Chelsea, Derby and Everton manager, now 45, explained. “Just as she was getting better, everyone was excited, she passed away there and then, so it was like the biggest devastation.

“Years later, I realise that this happens to so many other people and when you’re a young man who hadn’t really lost anyone, you don’t have that real feeling of what that is.

“I lost the person who was the closest person to me, everything to me. I’ll never forget the feeling in my stomach. If I talk about it I get it instantly again. I lost what was my best friend, the person who gave me all of that kind of emotional stuff and warmth. The sudden feeling of someone’s not going to be with you, it doesn’t compare to anything when you’re that close.”

Lampard added: “If I look back I think, ‘Maybe I should’ve come out of [football], life is bigger than that’ but it was probably a tiny coping mechanism for me. We played a game against Liverpool, the second leg, and I scored a penalty, we’d won the game and now we’re getting sent to the Champions League final.

“I remember sitting in the dressing room afterwards and I had this almighty sense of fatigue, body and mental fatigue. I went home and opened a beer, couldn’t even drink it and went to bed, and everything came out of me then, it was like a week or two full-blast of this complete pain.

“I’ve still got her number in my phone and still got a couple of voice note things. We were never a family who took videos and stuff, and I wish we were. The only thing is my mum’s sister is Sandra Redknapp, Harry Redknapp’s wife, and every time I speak to Sandra, I hear my mum. They look very similar, they sound very similar and in the first period it was painful but now it’s kind of nice because that’s a memory for me.

“The feeling of grief, it catches up with me now and again many years later. I think I probably had a year where I was single, drinking a little bit but I was playing fantastic football, I had a really good year of football, it was weird. Then I met Christine and thank god she came along around at that time because I was a little bit not right.”

Fans reacted as Frank Lampard opens up on trouble at Everton and Chelsea, life as manager, and the impact of his mum’s death among many of things…

@AdamThomas442: This looks like another great conversation. You’re smashing them out of the park at the moment Steven.

@CFCZED1: You can use any PR but the fact remains the dude is below average coach, he should try pundit

@elIisburner: He’s just an average coach that’s it

@marstonworld: Great player, awful coach, worse ego…

@DentonPhil: Loved the interview. You really got behind the image of the manager/footballer to give us a glimpse of the man that Frank is. I was and am really impressed by the man. I have no doubt that he will continue to be a better and better manager because he is a “bar raiser”.

@yeswekante7: As I said many times Frank is my favorite chelsea player and that will never change I will always love him regardless how bad of a manager he is and as I said last season it’s on Todd and potter not frank for coming in and helping for 11 games ,he is our legend and will always be

@ChessyHour: Everyone else’s fault as per. He’s an actual disgrace. Any owner that decides to hire him deserves relegation.

@sparkz91: Love the bloke as a player but as a ‘coach/manager’ I despise him. Chelsea with a new structure have people overseeing the make up of the squad now. So why didn’t he like Poch has, make a ‘bomb squad’ of players who weren’t going to be part of our future…

@JPB_21: This is a really great watch/listen. It’s nice to see Lampard, a genuine childhood hero of mine be vulnerable and open about things too.

@ChelseaScotsman: Going to start with yes I know Frank isn’t a very good coach … but people in the comments with “stop blaming the players, the only issue last season were you’re a bad coach” are absolutely off their heads 🤷‍♂️..there’s a reason we’ve shipped out about 11 players so far this summer

@NotSoLocalHero: Steven Bartlett is definitely taking a commission when Frank ends up in another Premier League job this October off the back of this.

@grantlothian1: He was shite! And he needs to own that!

@Celery1111: Sorry but this just sounds like more excuses from Frank, always deflecting the blame nothing is ever his fault when he did a shit job for both clubs. Lampard fielded the most depressing, uninspiring lineups ever and still won’t accept any blame

@Sparkseeker10: He’s one of the best players in Premier League history but also one of the worst managers in Premier League history.