Is Frank Lampard a good manager?
It feels like an extremely basic question and one that we should be able to answer given the new Coventry City manager is now on his fourth different club and has been in dugouts, on and off, since 2018.
But the circumstances under which he has taken his previous jobs have been so difficult and unusual that it’s incredibly tough to work out just how good he is. Before this week, Lampard basically hasn’t had a normal gig.
His first appointment, at Derby for the 2018-19 season, was his most uncomplicated success, shepherding a fairly young team built around three brilliant loanees — Fikayo Tomori and Mason Mount from Chelsea, Harry Wilson from Liverpool — to the Championship play-off final. But even then the attention placed on the club around that time made it less a coaching gig and more a cult of personality: the joke was that the name of the club had been officially changed to Frank Lampard’s Derby County.
The start was promising and a sensible career arc would probably have included him staying in the Midlands for another season or two. But then the siren call of Chelsea came and Lampard was put in the tricky position of not being able to say no to a job he patently wasn’t ready for.
The club he had served so magnificently as a player had been placed under a transfer embargo and had just lost their best player since, well, Frank Lampard when Eden Hazard left for Real Madrid. He had to lean on youth products like Mount, Reece James and Tammy Abraham (although he did still have Antonio Rudiger, N’Golo Kante and Cesar Azpilicueta), and when you throw in the weirdness of Covid and empty stadiums, a fourth-place finish was impressive.
But then the wheels came off the following season and he was sacked in January with his side ninth in the table and having won just two of his final eight games. Was that harsh? He certainly thought so, but it certainly muddied the waters for anyone trying to judge his abilities.
A year later he got the Everton job, a dubious honour at the best of times but particularly so in January 2022, the club chaotic behind the scenes and the new manager having to deal with the fallout of Rafa Benitez’s poisonous spell in charge. Lampard has always said he wants to play attractive, attacking football, but it became clear that wouldn’t wash at Goodison: for the last couple of months of that season, he turned them into a horrible, aggressive team, which was exactly the right thing to do. It worked brilliantly and they survived.
But by the midway point of the following season, the cycle had come round again: Everton were second bottom of the table, Lampard was dismissed and Sean Dyche bustled through the doors. Again, a strange situation for a relatively inexperienced manager to deal with, but do you commend him for ensuring their survival in season one, or criticise him for taking them into the relegation zone in season two?
His second spell at Chelsea is barely worth considering — at his unveiling as Coventry manager on Thursday, he called it a “baby holding” job, essentially acting as a comforting father figure to stroke the club’s collective hair between them sacking Graham Potter after less than seven months in charge and appointing the man they actually wanted, Mauricio Pochettino.
So that’s four jobs, none of them normal, with mixed success throughout. You could cherry-pick elements from each to argue he’s good, just as you could to argue he’s no good.
When discussing his career this week, he emphasised how important the “context” of each job was when judging him. “You have to adapt to that context,” he said. “I went into Everton with an idea of where I wanted to go with it, but I realised that the way we were trying to go would probably have been a big problem, so rather than just stick to my identity, I had to change certain things. Sometimes you have to change your ways.”
Maybe this is all just making excuses for him. Maybe no managerial job is ‘normal’ and a good manager deals with the difficult situations they are presented with.
There’s also the accusation that his celebrity greatly outweighs his managerial ability. Lampard would undoubtedly not have got any of those jobs were it not for his standing as a player, but his name and profile getting him in these positions so early in his coaching career brings to mind watching Usain Bolt play football — his speed simply serves to put him in a position where his inadequacies can be exposed even more starkly, so an advantage becomes a disadvantage pretty quickly.
Lampard’s coaching ability is many times better than Bolt’s first touch, but he had to basically learn how to be a manager while being pushed down a hill in a barrel.
This brings us to Coventry, which arguably represents his best chance at a relatively normal job. The circumstances are still challenging: he is replacing Mark Robins, a club hero who took them from the bottom of League One to within a penalty shootout of the Premier League and whose dismissal earlier this month was unpopular among the fanbase. They’re 17th in the Championship, a wildly competitive and sometimes chaotic league, two points off the relegation zone.
But he’s had 18 months to recharge, refresh, reconsider his approach, and learn from others. He’s spent time with Pep Guardiola, Gareth Southgate, Thomas Frank and Roy Hodgson. He has studied and admired the work Andoni Iraola, his former team-mate at New York City, has done at Bournemouth.
“I’m more knowledgeable,” he said when asked by The Athletic how he has evolved as a manager since his early days. “I’d like to think I’m better through experience of good and bad. Everything’s an experience that can improve you, whether it goes well or not.
“I’m a million times more confident. I probably portrayed confidence in the beginning, but I’m much more confident now because in this job you have to be, you have to lead by example. I want to talk about the things that are important to me. I’ve got much more clarity on that than when I first went in.”
He has a young, talented and, in his words, “balanced” squad that based on ability and certain underlying numbers are in a false position. Relatively speaking, he isn’t under a huge amount of pressure. Coventry owner Doug King was keen to stress that no targets had been set and while promotion is the ultimate goal, the sense is he will have time.
They are 17th, but as well as being two points off the bottom three, they’re 10 points off the play-off places with nearly two-thirds of the season remaining. In the Championship, you can eat up that gap in a couple of months.
Coventry are clearly pretty enamoured to have him around. There were electronic banners outside their stadium on Thursday welcoming him to the club. They put out a detailed breakdown of his first day, presenting it as if publicising the Saturday line-up at Coachella.
He even managed to spin the idea of succeeding Robins as a positive. “I‘d like to look at it as picking up the good work he did,” he said. Maybe you need to squint a bit to fully take that one on board, but it’s also not a ludicrous idea.
Perhaps this is the second season he should have had, the formative sophomore year in which a young manager’s ideas and approach should have been honed in the Championship, just slightly out of sequence.
In short, this is Lampard’s clearest chance to prove that he is actually good. The challenges are there, but so are plenty of advantages. It’s a bit dramatic to say this is his last chance, but if this goes well, then he’ll be back in the Premier League one way or another, and if it goes badly, then who knows where he goes from there.
Is Frank Lampard a good manager? By the end of his time at Coventry, we will know.
(Top photo: Matthew Lewis/Getty Images)
