Frank Lampard: There was no spirit in Chelsea squad on my return, I wanted to sign Declan Rice

Frank Lampard offered a bruising critique of his Chelsea return and revealed he had previously tried to sign Declan Rice in an interview with the Diary of a CEO Podcast.

The Blues legend took over on an interim basis for the final 11 games of last season, winning only once as the club stuttered to its first bottom-half finish in the Premier League in almost three decades.

Lampard often referred to low standards within the squad when facing the media before and after games during his seven-week long return to Stamford Bridge.

This came in the final throes of a season where new owner Todd Boehly had already sacked Thomas Tuchel and replacement Graham Potter and signed so many new players that several were forced to miss out on their Champions League squad.

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Speaking to host Steven Bartlett on the latest edition of the podcast, Lampard pinpointed where the main issues had lay during his second spell in charge of the club, and why he felt there was little he could do differently despite finishing with a win percentage lower than 10 per cent.

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“Having worked there before as a coach and player, I know the standards,” he said. “This isn’t a direct criticism of the players, because when I look at their situations where they were, and it had been a long year, I walked in with 10 games to go and they’d been there the whole season.

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“A lot of players weren’t playing, they were probably going to leave, which we’re seeing now, and I could see in training the level wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough to get a result against whoever you want to say; Brentford at home, let alone Real Madrid. Winning culture starts with basic standards.

“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.

“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.

Image: Chelsea picked up only five points from nine Premier League matches under Lampard last season

“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 contextualise 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.”

While Lampard’s brief return ended poorly, it rounded off a season over underachievement at Stamford Bridge less than two years after Chelsea lifted the Champions League trophy in 2021.

Lampard declined to be drawn on exactly what had gone wrong in the intervening period but suggested to Bartlett the Blues’ overall recruitment strategy had not helped the situation he walked into in April of this year – and explained why he had wanted to sign Arsenal-bound Declan Rice during his first stint at the club.

“Chelsea won the Champions League a few months after I left, and then you kind of think where’s the next move, what things work then, and maybe some players left during that period where you wanted to bring in some players who would be the future,” he said.

Image: Delcan Rice is close to moving to Arsenal from West Ham for a record transfer fee for a British player

“When I was at Chelsea before, I wanted to bring in Declan Rice. I said he would be the captain of Chelsea for the next 10 years. It didn’t happen, but it’s hard for me to dissect other people’s work between when I left the club and came back. I came into what I came into, and it would be a little bit casual for me to say what they should’ve done differently.”

The 45-year-old, who added he was in no hurry to return to football management, did offer some hope for the club’s future under new head coach Mauricio Pochettino, and provided positivity about the underlying intentions of Boehly’s ownership despite a rocky start to life in West London.

He said: “It’s understood now [by the ownership] in terms of having a squad of 30 players and you’ve seen already how a number have already left. The intentions are good, the owners gave me an opportunity to go in there and I had a good relationship with them.

“They want to take the club and be the best, and now those younger players, with a new voice and manager, I think they’ll have a greater chance to show what they’ve got anyway. If you’re asking five, six, seven players to come in during a difficult moment for the club and hit the ground running, it’s understandable [that they struggle].

“As a Chelsea fan, you look at it and the positives that there’s talent there, the squad’s getting trimmed. You’ll see players like Enzo Fernandez, Mikhaylo Mudryk, Noni Madueke, they’ll develop and be big players for the club. You have to get the structure and strategy right going forward.

“Sometimes for whatever reason, there’s a transition of maybe new ownership. I was there before they came in and in terms of consistency, winning Premier League titles and really challenging, that’s not been there for a good few years now.”