Frank Lampard's Journey: Blending Jose Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti
Frank Lampard has spent most of his football life answering to giants. Now, eight years into management and fresh from dragging Coventry City back into the Premier League, he is trying to blend them.
On BBC One’s The Football Interview, airing at 12:45 every Saturday during the Premier League season and also available on BBC iPlayer, BBC Football’s YouTube channel and the BBC Sport website and app, Lampard sits down with musician and Sky Blues fan Tom Grennan to unpick the influences that shaped him – and the reality of what comes next.
Between Jose and Carlo
Lampard’s playing career put him under some of the sharpest minds in the game: Jose Mourinho, Carlo Ancelotti, Guus Hiddink, Rafael Benitez – plus his uncle, Harry Redknapp. Two names, though, loom largest when he talks about how he now works.
“Jose and Carlo are like both sides of the coin,” the 48-year-old told BBC Sport.
Mourinho, he says, was relentless. Demanding. A manager who “transmitted his self-confidence” and whose anger you felt if you stepped out of line. Ancelotti, by contrast, was “chilled and calm”, the kind of coach who made you feel trusted.
“When you look back, you go, ‘that’s a nice environment to work in’,” Lampard said. “It felt like he trusted you. So I try and take little snippets. I’m probably somewhere in the middle.”
He knows exactly what that blend delivered. Under Mourinho and Ancelotti at Chelsea, Lampard won Premier League titles and FA Cups, part of a haul that also included three league crowns overall, the Champions League in 2012, four FA Cups, two League Cups and the Europa League.
Now, at Coventry, he is trying to apply the same balance.
“I start to sometimes go towards being Jose, sometimes I go and be a bit more Carlo,” he admitted.
Early in his coaching career, he felt the need to show authority. Call out bad performances. Hammer the player who turned up late. With experience, that edge has softened.
“The more I’ve done this job, I realise that they’re all humans,” he said. “Sometimes a lad comes in late, you don’t know the back story. And so trying to jump on him and being this hard man manager, you’ve got to be more Carlo. But then if you’re a bit more relaxed sometimes and people are on the pitch, not doing their job, sometimes you’ve got a bit more Jose.”
Promotion that rivals Munich
Coventry’s promotion last season, secured with a 95-point Championship title after Lampard arrived in November 2024, has changed the conversation around him. It also changed how he feels about his own career.
“When you get promoted, it’s hard to balance against winning the Champions League with Chelsea,” he said. “Winning in Munich was the best footballing night of my life as a player by far.
“But then when you do something with a club that’s been through what it’s been through, when you work with a group of lads that are so great as a dressing room – I’ve never experienced, especially as a coach, to have such a good group.
“When we got promoted against Blackburn, I had a rush of pure emotion, it all came on top of me. It certainly goes right up there in things I’ve managed to achieve.”
This is not a manager who has sailed through the dugout game untouched. After an encouraging first step with Derby in 2018, where he took them to the Championship play-off final before losing to Aston Villa, came the harsher lessons.
His spell at Chelsea lasted 18 months before he was sacked in January 2021. At Everton, he survived less than a year, leaving Goodison Park in January 2023. Those experiences hardened him, but they have not turned him bitter.
Doubters, noise and the Premier League reality
Lampard insists he is not fuelled by the urge to silence critics, even as Coventry prepare for their first Premier League campaign in 25 years.
“The thing about modern-day football – you’re brilliant one minute, you might not be brilliant the next and then everyone will let you know that,” he told Grennan.
“You’ve got to be careful trying to prove every doubter wrong, because it’s not possible.”
The ambition is still there, of course. It always has been.
“My personal ambition to prove any doubters wrong is sort of always there, but I try not to let that be my driver,” he explained. “I’ve been in the Premier League as a player, I’ve been as a manager, I understand the challenge of it. I can’t get ahead of myself and I can’t worry too much about the outside world because otherwise you succumb to it, you’d be making different decisions.”
The top flight has already reminded Coventry how brutal it can be. A 3-0 defeat to champions Arsenal on the opening weekend underlined the step up.
Lampard knows his side cannot just roll out last season’s script.
“We want to keep hold of the good things from last year,” he said. “We’d be fools to think that we’d just go and play like we did in the ‘Champ’ every week when we dominated a lot of games.”
The adjustment, he accepts, starts at the back. Defensive resilience, game management, surviving long spells without the ball – all of it becomes non-negotiable now.
Chests out, not hiding
The obvious question hovers over every newly promoted club: is survival the target?
“Everyone’s going to ask me, ‘staying in the league, is that your target?’” Lampard said. “Of course it would be success, because it’s such a big challenge for us, but in the beginning, we’ll go into it and go, ‘let’s stick our chests out and let’s be brave about it’.”
The message to his players is clear. They earned this.
“These boys have earned where they’ve got to, so go in with that attitude. There’s a lot to lose, but go and show yourselves.”
Next up is Hull City at home on Saturday, Coventry’s first Premier League game back in front of their own fans. After Arsenal away, it feels like a more realistic barometer of where they stand.
Somewhere between Jose’s fire and Carlo’s calm, Lampard is trying to build a team – and a season – that proves they belong.
