It is easy to imagine that the end of a footballer’s career comes as a massive, debilitating shock, suddenly depriving the player not just of their livelihood but also of routine, friendship, fitness and excitement. A little over a year since that moment came for Frank Lampard, he looks at it a little differently. There have been times, he says, when the sudden change in his life has “smacked me in the face”, but more commonly he has appreciated the release of the pressure accumulated over 21 years at the top of the game. As he plots his return to the sport as a manager, however, he is aware that it is only likely to be temporary.
“I didn’t make all the right decisions in my career, far from it, but when I got to the end I felt I’d given it my full whack,” he says. “When you can think: ‘I put everything on the table and that’s my lot,’ I think you have been quite successful. That’s probably what drove me on as a player for quite a long while – I wanted to make sure I took every ounce out of the game and got the most out of myself.
“And then it becomes like a relief, when you feel that the work’s done and it wasn’t too bad. I didn’t have too many failures, and I actually did some pretty good stuff. I’m very content with that. I’ve hardly kicked a ball since I finished, and I’ve got no craving to kick a ball. I do other things now.”
Lampard won four FA Cups, three league titles, two League Cups and the Champions League and Europa League once each, as well as winning 106 England caps in an international career that stretched for only a few months short of 15 years. “When you’re at a big club, there isn’t much breathing space,” he says. “You’re continuously trying to win things, to perform to the best of your ability, and it can be quite tiring. I’ll be honest, at the end of my career I was ready to move on. In terms of the intense pressure I put on myself for that period of time, I felt ready. I’m asked a lot now: ‘Are you missing football?’ And I’m actually not. I sit here pretty happy with my lot.
“When you’re playing you get looked after, you have people around you who completely put you out of the real world, and then the real world hits you smack in the face when you finish. But I was fortunate in that the transition hasn’t been a problem for me. I needed the pause, I really did. I needed the lack of structure in my life for a while. I felt kind of ready for that. It was a necessity for me to get away. It’s been a year and a half, almost, and now I have the hunger. So it’ll come when it comes, if the right opportunity comes for me.”
Lampard has remained involved with football, swapping the pitch for punditry while he works on his coaching qualifications – he starts the Pro Licence course in September – and puts what he is learning into practice at Chelsea’s academy. “I’ve picked up a lot in this year, working in the media, traveling around” he says. “You have to do it properly. I don’t just roll up and go: ‘That was a good game.’ You have to look at the players, the tactics.
“That’s why I’m not setting a time limit on the move into management. You don’t just flick a switch – you need to learn a lot again. There are no shortcuts as I see it.”
Looking back at his playing career, Lampard says “my biggest talent – or certainly one of them – was my work ethic and dedication”. He spent most of those years primarily focused on himself, on constant betterment. He is conscious, however, that such a mindset cannot survive in management.
Lampard has remained involved with football, swapping the pitch for punditry while he works on his coaching qualifications – he starts the Pro Licence course in September – and puts what he is learning into practice at Chelsea’s academy. “I’ve picked up a lot in this year, working in the media, travelling around” he says. “You have to do it properly. I don’t just roll up and go: ‘That was a good game.’ You have to look at the players, the tactics.
“That’s why I’m not setting a time limit on the move into management. You don’t just flick a switch – you need to learn a lot again. There are no shortcuts as I see it.”
Looking back at his playing career, Lampard says “my biggest talent – or certainly one of them – was my work ethic and dedication”. He spent most of those years primarily focused on himself, on constant betterment. He is conscious, however, that such a mindset cannot survive in management.
His favorite coaches as a player, and the ones he wants to emulate, were those best at relating to the different characters in their team, and identifying for each one the approach that brought the greatest reward. “As a player you can be pretty selfish,” he says. “As a manager it’s the complete opposite of that. I’m really interested in the idea of trying to man-manage a group as well as I possibly could, to deal with a real mixed, diverse dressing room like we have these days. There’s not one rule for everyone. I read a lot now because I love to find out about how other managers have tackled these things. That’s where the magic is.”
Since retirement Lampard has filled what gaps have appeared in his life with travel, leisure and family. There have been no suddenly discovered hobbies or interests, no trips to the golf course. He lives his life according to the principles that drove him throughout his playing career. He has spoken before about his faith, and how it helped him through the death of his mother, a decade ago last week. He describes himself as a “not completely practicing” Christian, but his beliefs inform everything he does.
“I go about my life in terms of, I try to do everything right. And when I say right, I mean with the right intentions,” he says. “So when I work, I work as hard as I can; when I have people around me I try to respect those people. Of course you make mistakes. But as I go through life if I feel like I’m doing it right – and this is what I try to tell my daughters now – then hopefully things will come good for me.
“What you put in is what you get out. I think that in modern society – and I’m not preaching here, far from it – we do forget the basics, in terms of manners and respect for the people around you. I got brought up with those things, particularly from my mum, so I try to replicate them as much as I can, and pass them on to my daughters. I certainly don’t feel that I approach life now the way I did when I was 20. But I do treat people as I want to be treated myself, and I try to take that around with me.”
Perhaps that is why, for all the time he spent identifying his weaknesses as a footballer and laboriously improving them, for all the caps, trophies and goals, when that time came to an end what he wanted people to remember was something entirely different. “What I would have loved at the end of my career,” he says, “was for someone to just say: ‘He was a good team-mate.’ Not just on the pitch but also as a friend, as a buffer, as a person.”
(The Guardian)
