Why Frank Lampard Is A Risky Appointment For Everton

A year after being sacked by Chelsea Frank Lampard has agreed to return to football as the new manager of Everton.

After the club held positive talks with Lampard at the end of last week, it is understood the appointment will be officially confirmed on Monday.  

Everton also conducted second interviews with their current caretaker manager Duncan Ferguson and the Portuguese coach Vitor Pereira.

It had been thought the vastly experienced Pereira, who has previously managed Porto, Olympiacos, 1860 Munich and Fenerbahce, was the frontrunner for the job until Everton fans made their opposition to him clear.

On a wall near Goodison Park last week graffiti was sprayed that read “Pereira out, Lampard in,” which unnerved the Everton hierarchy.

Instead Everton have turned to Lampard to rescue their disappointing season, but their long-suffering fans should be careful what they wish for.

There might be a reassuring familiarity about Lampard, after being a fixture in the Premier League for the last two decades, but this has been mostly as a player.

What exactly does Lampard the manager bring to Goodison Park? The former England international has only taken charge of 57 Premier League games, which all came during his eighteen months at Chelsea.

Appointed in the summer of 2019, Lampard made a promising start, and overcame both the departure of Eden Hazard and the club’s transfer ban to guide them to a finish of fourth and a place in the FA Cup final where they lost to Arsenal.

Being unable to recruit new players, Lampard was forced to work with the club’s young talent, helping Mason Mount and Reece James realise their vast potential and turning them into established internationals.

The following summer Chelsea were let loose on the transfer market and spent more than £220 million on a set of new players, including Hakim Ziyech, Timo Werner, Ben Chilwell, Thiago Silva, Kai Havertz and Edouard Mendy.

At first Lampard was able to knit these new players together and took them on an unbeaten run of 17 games between September and December, which saw them briefly sit at the top of the Premier League.

But when Chelsea began to hit trouble before Christmas Lampard was powerless to halt their slide to ninth in the table as they lost 5 times in 8 games.

Chelsea had little faith in Lampard’s ability to reverse this sudden decline and dismissed him at the end of January last year. He left with the worse points-per-game average (1.67) of any Chelsea manager in the Premier League.

Before Chelsea Lampard had only spent a season with Derby County in the Championship, where he performed well, taking them to a finish of sixth and a place in the Play-Off final where they lost to Aston Villa.

Derby County managers who finish sixth in the Championship don’t get interviewed for the Chelsea job, never mind actually getting it.

Lampard got in the room with Chelsea because of his name, which to his credit he has recently acknowledged. “I sat there in the interview knowing that Derby managers for one year don’t get the Chelsea job,” he has said. “They don’t get it. It normally goes to a manager who’s been in Europe and had success.”

Lampard has lost 30 of his 103 league games with Derby and Chelsea, a record that should concern Everton.

After the Goodison Park club’s dreadful start to the season, which has seen them fall to 16^th in the table, just four points above the relegation zone, it seemed they needed an experienced manager to offer some stability.

Instead they have gone for Lampard, which could soon pose a risk to their proud record of having played in the top flight for the last 68 seasons.