Frank Lampard Finally Speaks Out “I Knew From The Moment I Walked In…”

Is there anything at all you would say to Chelsea fans that are watching this now that are, that would love to, you know, Chelsea fans will be listening to this because they want to get A, your opinion on what's just happened, but they probably want to get your opinion on like what you think the future looks like I guess. And also I think a lot of them do want to like check in on you because since you've left we've not really heard from you in such context. Yeah and I've enjoyed that, I've enjoyed not speaking, it's been nice. No I think for Chelsea fans I would say that, in terms of what do I think is next, I listened to Pochettino spoke yesterday, it was his first press conference and he spoke very well and he spoke about bringing a unity at the training ground and a family feel and then winning which is Chelsea DNA. So I think we've got a really good manager in charge and I think the players will definitely develop with their, you know, as they develop naturally, they're good players, young players. There has to be some patience in putting that together because I think that has to be clear and the owners have a big intention. So I think as things settle, it may not be straight away, but I think that there's a really positive future for the club and I was in it and it was tough, but you know I know how quickly things can change if you get the strategy right. In terms of me, I'm absolutely fine and I'd certainly appreciate the support I had from, as I say, a majority, a lot of fans that would contact me, albeit Stamford Bridge, and for anybody that was on the other side of that was like, why is Frank back in the job? I think maybe I've explained some of my part in it today and some of the challenges. I'll always take responsibility. I wouldn't walk back into that challenge without sort of saying, this might not go right and what's my responsibility? But Chelsea's always a huge club and as I say, I never went back to Chelsea until three days before I went and took the interim job manager and I went to the Liverpool game and ended up having a conversation and it was a difficult period for me for some reason. I left in COVID, as I say, and I moved on to Everton and it reignited that kind of feeling of being back at Stamford Bridge, I have to say. Not that I lost it, it just reignited it and you know, so to Chelsea fans, I'm fine. I'm fine. I appreciate their support, even my playing career. It's nice when you finish playing because your playing career is there and I can look back on it with a lot of pleasure for a lot of the good moments. When you're in it, it's like, what's next? And you're sort of like always challenging yourself. When you finish, you kind of go, yeah, you know, that was good. That was all right. It was a lot of good stuff. So they were good times and I was very thankful to be part of a great club and we'll see. What is the thing that happens in a club like Chelsea, in your experience, when you went back there, that had caused that dropping of standards, which we now saw on the pitch with your sort of 10 games there? Well, I think when I was tongue-in-cheek, by the way, when I said I'm not going to see them again, because it was a bit like, as I say, I wouldn't say I hadn't said it to them and I've said it a few times, but the position of it was that, and I think the biggest thing about the standards thing was the size of the squad. It was the motivation of players that you're going to not play or you're out of the Champions League squad or these things like, it's like asking, you know, one of you, I don't know, you maybe love doing this. This is like one of your great moments. I want to sit and you want to speak to all these fantastic people that you speak to. Thanks for your prep, Steve, and now Peter Jones is going to do it. Cheers. How long are you going to go with that? And I think in football that's a challenge with 20 or so players, which is a modern squad, but with Chelsea it's got very big to the point where, this is how I felt, where I can say, you know, I'm not criticising that player for dropping standards. I want to try and get something out of him, because I had a short period. I want to try and get something out of him, so I would try, but then when you actually look at it, you kind of go, yeah, but he's had this for a long time where he's not playing, so he's not now being competitive with that player who is playing, so that player is pretty comfortable too, because he's not pushing him. So you kind of get these things where you're like, you know, we probably took it for granted in some of my better days at Chelsea when we were successful, of like, this kind of thing works, you know, it wasn't even a thing you said, you know, you didn't have to sort of have a meeting every day and go, you know, one of those standards, culture, you know, nice pie chart, and that's what that is. It was almost like, this is what we do, and at the minute, sometimes, for whatever reason, there's a transition of maybe new ownership, you know, not everything was perfect before the new ownership, I was there before the new ownership as well, like, to find consistency as Chelsea would really want of winning Premier League titles and challenging has been a good few years now, so I think that getting the squad right, being able, probably a fresh voice as a manager coming in now, who's obviously a fantastic manager with a great record to come in and go, no, this is the way, and now the squad looks compact, you're going to compete with each other, and try and create a great environment, everyone needs a great environment to have success, you know, you cannot have a success without team spirit and togetherness, so when I got there, I could just see that the spirit and the togetherness was not there, and it was nothing bad, you know, like, it was not bad to go through the week, I could just see, like, you have to train elite to be elite, you have to, and that's not, you know, in the modern day, players play every few days sometimes, when I say that, it's not like, show me how many sprints you can do every day, it's like, okay, we're doing prep tomorrow, give me that intensity of thought about what this is for you, and let me see it in your face, but in Chelsea, when you did that, you had 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 as they walked off some of them, that they were like, again, because they've been having it all season, some of them, so on a human level, I completely understood, and in the end, it was like, I came back here because, obviously, this was an opportunity to come to my club, you know, Chelsea, a club close to my heart, but as soon as I got in, I realised that, probably, I thought, you know what, 30 players, I can motivate in six, seven weeks, because it's not like a long-term thing, I can come in and be fresh, but in terms of what, when I came in, I noticed very quickly that some players were probably thinking about, this season's going to peter out, and what's the future going to look like, and that was a difficult situation, to be fair. It never crossed my mind that the size of the squad has such a big impact, but it makes perfect sense, because you need that sort of healthy competition, and I believe your first team was, was it 32 players? Yeah. Which is more than you're allowed to register for the Premier League or Champions League, so you had this kind of surplus of... A lot of players, a few are always injured, probably, you know, so that comes down a bit, but it's a surplus, and it's a surplus of, the makeup of the squad is international players, generally, because if there were a couple of young players, but when you try and build a squad, it would be like, this is, you know, this is my core, kind of 15 or 16, and then you're going, maybe these two experienced players that might not need to play really, and then we've got these kids that are waiting, and they're like, just happy to be there, they want to play, they're going to be training, and if you give them an opportunity, they'll be like, but when you have like, international players in a big number, then of course, you know, you're telling internationals, you've got to stay at home. It's not easy, and you know, to have the conversation every Friday with them, and get them lined up, coming in, is also not easy for your own energy, you know what I mean, so that's not easy, I don't care how, what kind of a man manager you are, like, it's like, next, you're not playing, okay, next, you're not playing, you know, like, whatever, however you try and box that up to a player, eventually, they'll probably go, I know I'm not playing, you know, like, stop telling me this shit, do you know what I mean, so I think, you know, that was an interesting learning curve for me, like, an interim job is what it is, and I kept getting asked, you know, people, it was kind of frustrating at times, like, are you finding this so hard, are you finding this so hard, I was like, you know what, I'm back home in a club that I love, you know, a fantastic training ground, I'm doing everything I can in this job to try and improve it, but there were, I knew behind the scenes, there were a lot of things, you know, myself and my staff, we want to improve, we want to coach, we want to sort of, when you, when you lack those basics, and as I say, I think there's an understanding in the club that it has to change now, I think it has to, it has to change, then if you lack those basics, then it's really hard to get where you want to get to. How does that happen though, so there's these 32 players, and then Chelsea spends more money than I think anyone's ever spent in a window, in that sort of January window, you bring in all of these players on these long contracts, which I've never heard before, I think it was like eight-year contracts, and they're all like class amazing individual players, is that a, is that because the new owner doesn't understand those dynamics of football, because that's what it seemed like for me, I thought either this is a genius or an idiot, you know, I don't want to criticise anyone like on a personal level, but as a fan looking and I go, signing these players on eight-year contracts, they're great players spending all this money, the impact on culture when you just throw stars in at such quantity, it looked like inexperience and naivety. I think that's understood now, in terms of what it's meant with those 30 players, and I think you've seen that now, in that already I think around six, seven, eight players have left, so I think that the intentions are certainly good, I know that because I worked, the owners gave me an opportunity to go in there, and I had a good relationship with them, their intentions to do a good job at Chelsea are amazing, they want to take the club and be the best, you know, they have great intentions, so now I think those younger players, now with a new voice, a new manager, the squad coming tighter, I think they'll have a greater chance to show what they've got anyway, and they're talented players, and you know, I remember being in Chelsea when Eden Hazard arrived, the pre-season it was like, is this kid, he was a bit lazy looking, you know, he was a bit kind of strolling around, is this kid definitely, and then that first season it was like, I know he's really good, and then on the second and third he's like, no this kid's one of the best players the Premier League's seen, or whatever. Thierry Henry, Didier Drogba, you can go through all these players who are absolute legends, now if you're asking those five, six, seven players to come in in a difficult moment for the club, it's understandable, so I think as a Chelsea fan, you know, you look at it and kind of go, right, okay, that is positive, there's talent there, okay, it needs to be worked with, now I'm sure that you can see the squad's getting trimmed, and as I can say, hand on heart, the intentions of the owners is absolutely, you know, they've spent that money because they want to do well, now if they're going to address the situation a bit, that's their strategy going forward, but I do think, you know, you'll see players like Enzo Fernandes, Modric, and these players, Madawiki, young players, they're going to develop and they're going to be big players for the club, you have to get the structure right and the strategy right going forward. My thing is that adding like, I don't know, six or seven of these players all at once, pretty much halfway through the season, in a squad that's already struggling to figure out who it is under Graham Potter, it begs the question, like, who's doing the recruitment here? Because at other clubs, it's a much more strategic, it seems like a much more strategic and intentional and football-driven approach to recruitment, whereas from what I saw at Chelsea, and I have actually spoken to some people at Chelsea who are involved in recruitment, it seemed like chaos. Yeah, I mean, I wasn't there for that period, right, so that was in, I got there in April, and like, so January was the last window, and obviously they spent last summer, but I think the change of ownership, and then obviously some people moved on who were in the hierarchy of the club, and so there was changes, so there was a big change of structure, so I think you have to give some time and some leeway for the process, and there certainly now are sporting directors and recruitment people in there, having worked with them, who are very talented, very hungry, you know, good to go, and I think now it will be up to them to take the club forward. They haven't signed bad players, I think maybe the strategy of bringing them all in at that time, you know, looks a bit excitable at the minute, as in terms of there's a lot of players for success, but I think probably there's a long game, and I think there's a plan, and I think probably most huge clubs like Chelsea have had a version of what this period is, Manchester United, you mentioned there, Arsenal for quite a long time, Liverpool for periods, you know, so I think to overjudge now, when I think they have signed some good players, would be to be overcritical, I think at the moment, I think the proof will be now how these players develop, once now it feels a bit more settled going forward. I think that's all true, I think, what's the optimal way for player recruitment to happen, in your opinion, because you often hear about these stories of where an owner will take charge of a club and then they'll just decide who they want, which is probably what I'd be like if I was an owner, I think I would, like football manager, I think I just buy who I want to buy, who I think looks good, Manchester United suffered with that, it felt like our decisions were commercial decisions, as opposed to footballing decisions, then when Eric Ten Hag's come in, it feels a bit more like it's football decisions, but in your opinion, and then I did speak to some people at Chelsea, because I actually went to, I was invited to sit with Richard Arnold and a couple of the Manchester United executives, and when we played Chelsea at Old Trafford, I was in the director's box, so I sat with the new sporting director at Chelsea, and he said there's now two sporting directors, I believe, so it was interesting to talk to them, but what is about the optimal way for recruitment to happen, in your opinion? Well, I think you have to understand what you want the philosophy and the identity of the club to be, so for instance, I think Manchester City are quite firm in the idea when Pep Guardiola has come in and the sporting directors have worked at previously with him, that this is how we want to play, this is a manager that's going to deliver that style, so here's how we recruit for that style. Chelsea's always been a bit different for me, the beautiful game, the tick attack as you'd call it at Man City, it's not been Chelsea style, it's been more of a winning machine in a different kind of way, you know, in my day it was more of a powerful team, we were good on the eye, but we were not that kind of, you know, pass, pass, pass, we were like powerful and effective, so I think you have to understand what you want to be, and once you get to that point, you probably, the first thing is to recruit a coach that, you know, works within that, and then, you know, that's the kind of coach you want, because this is what you want to be, those conversations are an interview process, and then once you get to that point, I think the recruitment has to be joined up, depending on how active the owner wants to be, and I respect and appreciate active owners, it's their clubs, their prerogative, and then the sporting directors, and the manager, and then obviously recruitment, which brings all the data analysis into the picture, and it has to be joined up, and you have to be all very confident by the time you want to bring in a player, that you're going, yeah, this is the player we want to bring in, there are always one, or two, or three options, because you may not get target number one, but I think you have to be able to recruit for the style that you want to be, so the coach really has to have a big buy-in to that as well, but you, as a coach in the modern day, you understand the process, I appreciate being aligned, and having other people, not just responsible for who you're bringing in, but also like giving me something that I don't know, I'm not there siphoning through the data, you know, they have to show you that data, and here's the reasons why, the videos, people that watch them, and also the personality of the player, because, not to say you're going to sign, you know, 10 James Milners, because their character is amazing, and their professionalism, but you need to know that they're going to come in, and the dressing room is going to, they're going to be good for the dressing room, and they're going to help in terms of how you drive forward, in terms of their personality. If you love the DRIVERS CEO brand, and you watch this channel, please do me a huge favor, become part of the 15% of the viewers on this channel, that have hit the subscribe button, it helps us tremendously, and the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests.