The former manager of Chelsea, Frank Lampard, has revealed that he met a different Chelsea side when he returned to the club towards the end of the 2022-2023 season.
Frank Lampard who is Chelsea’s all-time highest goalscorer first became the coach of the club in 2019. He succeeded in qualifying the club for the Champions League at the end of the 2019-2020 season.
In the middle of the 2020-2021 season, the former England international was sacked due to a poor run of games. He was replaced by German tactician Thomas Tuchel who went on to win the UEFA Champions League for the club in the same season.
Ahead of the 2022-2023 season, Chelsea changed ownership as Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich was forced out of the club as a punishment for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
American businessman Todd Boehly and his consortium took over the club and went on a spending spree in the 2022 summer transfer window which continued in the same part in January. The club spent about £600 million in bringing in new players.
Despite all that, they struggled to win games which led to the sack of Thomas Tuchel, and the appointment of Graham Potter who was also sacked as the fate of the club failed to improve.
Ahead of the last 11 games of the season, Frank Lampard shocking returned to the club as manager but he could not do much as the club finished as low as in the 12th spot.
In an interview with the Diary of a CEO Podcast hosted by Steven Bartlett, Frank Lampard admitted that the Chelsea he met at Stamford Bridge was not up to the expected standard.
“When I got there I could just see the spirit and togetherness wasn’t there. It was nothing bad, it wasn’t bad to go through the week, but you have to train elite to be elite. You have to”, he said.
“The biggest thing about it was the size of the squad. The motivation of players who you’re not going to not play, or are out of the Champions League squad, or things like that, it’s like asking someone to do all the prep and then have someone else actually do the job.
“I had a short period, so I wanted to try, but when you look at it you think about a player who has had this for a long time of not playing, and he’s now not being competitive with the player who is ahead of him. So that other player is probably pretty comfortable too. We took [that competition] for granted in some of my better days at Chelsea as a player.
“The period as an interim was so abstract, so different that I can’t contextualize it by saying ‘If I’d gone in on day one and done a meeting about culture’ or ‘Maybe if my tactics were slightly different in that game’ because I don’t think it would’ve changed things.”
Chelsea are now coached by former Tottenham Hotspur and Paris Saint Germain manager Mauricio Pochettino. And as Frank Lampard mentioned in the interview above, Chelsea are seriously cutting down on the club’s squad size.
So far in the summer of 2023, Chelsea have allowed 12 players to leave the club and more are expected to exit before the commencement of the 2023-2024 season.
