In the heady summer of 2018, when everything was new, exciting and just a little daunting, Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard exchanged as many messages as they had during all the years they spent as England team-mates.
As players, they had seemed to be living parallel lives and now, almost in unison, they were taking their first steps in management: Gerrard at Rangers, Lampard at Derby County. Encountering new challenges at every turn, whether on the training pitch, in the transfer market or behind the scenes, they messaged back and forth constantly, discussing what Lampard called “the mad life of management”.
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It is a crazily volatile business: Lampard took Chelsea to the top of the Premier League on December 5, 2020, but was out of a job seven weeks later. His successor Thomas Tuchel led them to the Champions League but was sacked because his ideas on player recruitment were at odds with those of the American businessman who, after his consortium bought the club and appointed him interim sporting director, oversaw a seven-week, £250million spending spree that has so far brought no discernible benefit.
Yes, football management is mad in so many ways. Roy Hodgson described it as a “sadistic pleasure”. Arsene Wenger once likened it to “living on a volcano; any day could be your last”.
Gerrard and Lampard know that feeling. Both left their first job on their own terms, jumping at the opportunity to decamp to Aston Villa and Chelsea respectively, and at that point they might briefly have wondered whether they were destined to succeed where so many great players have failed.
But Gerrard was sacked in October after less than a year in charge at Villa and Lampard, having done well to last 18 months under Roman Abramovich at Chelsea, was relieved of his duties at Everton on Monday, eight days short of his first anniversary in the post.
Once again there is that sense of two careers unfolding in parallel — except this time, rather than scrapping over the game’s biggest prizes during their pomp at Liverpool and Chelsea respectively (or indeed chasing the same ball in the England midfield), they are destined to compete for the same openings in the job market.
As for which jobs that might involve, it will be interesting to see what comes of the Polish FA’s reported interest in Gerrard. Certainly, the former Liverpool captain’s hopes of succeeding Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool appear far more distant than they did before he left Rangers, while Lampard’s dream job came and went all too quickly at Chelsea long before he embraced a different shade of blue on Merseyside. Barely four years into their respective managerial careers, that early optimism has gone.
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Villa were 17th in the Premier League when they sacked Gerrard, having won just two of their first 11 matches of the season (and having won two out of the final 11 last term) but have swiftly stabilised and recovered under the more experienced Unai Emery. Everton were 19th in the table, level on points with bottom-placed Southampton, when they sacked Lampard, having won just three out of 19 matches this season and got just one point from their previous seven games.
Those statistics are damning and they go a long way towards explaining why neither Gerrard nor Lampard were surprised when the axe fell. By the time the end came, Lampard is said to have felt drained, ultimately, by the difficulties of managing a club which, under Farhad Moshiri’s ownership, has become a byword for dysfunction.
Some of Everton’s performances during those final weeks under Lampard were alarming. They defended resolutely to earn a 1-1 draw at Manchester City on New Year’s Eve and deserved better than a 3-1 defeat away to Manchester United in the FA Cup third round six days later, but it probably speaks volumes that Everton are the only team West Ham United have beaten in their last eight games, the only team Southampton have beaten in their last nine, and the only team Bournemouth have beaten in their last 11. Wolverhampton Wanderers, like Southampton, came from behind to win at Goodison Park. In what looked like a relegation dogfight, Everton became a pushover.
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The most positive thing that can be said of Lampard’s time at Everton is that 12 months on from his appointment, they need someone to come in and replicate what he did — to unify a struggling team and a disillusioned fanbase in pursuit of Premier League survival.
They were in a tailspin when he took over from Rafael Benitez last January, having taken just five points from the previous 10 games, and the mood on the terraces was every bit as mutinous as it is now. Things got worse (seven defeats in Lampard’s first nine games in charge) before they got better. And yet from a bleak situation, not least 2-0 down at home to Crystal Palace in their penultimate game, they rallied, they battled and they stayed up.
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At one stage this season they had gone six games unbeaten in the Premier League (two wins, four draws) and after eight games they had the best defensive record in the top flight, reinforced by the summer signings of Conor Coady on loan from Wolves and James Tarkowski on a free transfer from Burnley. The lack of goals at the other end was a concern, given the Richarlison-sized hole in the forward line, but at that point things looked positive. Then the wheels came off, just as they had under Benitez a year earlier, and it ended, inevitably, with the sack.
Similar happened on Lampard’s watch at Chelsea. They were doing well, moving in the right direction with a young, new-look team. Then suddenly, abruptly, things unravelled. Results deteriorated, confidence dropped, questions started to be asked and Lampard, looking in desperation to different personnel and different formations, no longer had the answers.
The fact is that Gerrard and Lampard have been learning on the job. On one level, that is the nature of football management — you never stop learning, never stop having to evolve — but it is undoubtedly problematic. Gerrard has had 232 games as a manager (192 at Rangers, 40 at Villa). Lampard has had 185 (57 at Derby, 84 at Chelsea, 44 at Everton). They have all the experience and know-how they accumulated over their playing careers at the top level with club and country, but once the aura of their on-pitch achievements has faded, they tend to be up against managers and coaches who boast far more experience, knowledge and success.
That includes the likes of Pep Guardiola, Antonio Conte and Klopp. It includes the likes of Julen Lopetegui and Emery, who have been competing in La Liga, the Champions League and Europa League for years. It also includes Eddie Howe, who, although a similar age to Gerrard and Lampard, has 596 games as a manager to his name (457 at Bournemouth, 86 at Burnley, 53 at Newcastle), and Steve Cooper, who, even if he has only had 175 matches as a manager at club level (105 at Swansea City, 70 at Nottingham Forest), had been coaching for more than a decade, working in Liverpool’s academy and then with England’s under-16 and under-17 teams, before getting his big break with Swansea.
None of this is to suggest that Gerrard and Lampard fell straight into management the way players of previous generations did. Both studied for it in the final years of their playing careers and then, upon hanging up their boots, took more than a year off, coaching at academy level (Gerrard with Liverpool’s under-18s, Lampard spending time across all age groups at Chelsea) before they were appointed by Rangers and Derby respectively.
Management wasn’t an afterthought for either of them. It wasn’t like, for example, Kenny Dalglish, Bryan Robson, Ruud Gullit or Gianluca Vialli: star player one day, player-manager the next. But their contemporaries managing in the Premier League are among the best in the world: highly qualified, highly skilled and in most cases highly experienced.
When Mikel Arteta was hired as Arsenal head coach in December 2019, some characterised it as a “silver spoon” appointment for someone who, at 37, had not long retired as a player. But he had spent the previous three and a half years as one of Guardiola’s assistants at Manchester City. Clearly Guardiola detected something in Arteta to merit such a lofty appointment, and it is hard to imagine a better apprenticeship, but it is easy to imagine that Arteta might have been quickly written off had he gone to another of his former clubs, Everton, rather than Arsenal, where he has been allowed to learn on the job and build without interference or turmoil from above.
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Managerial careers are notoriously difficult to predict, which underlines the fallacy of equating success on the pitch to the ability to deliver success from the touchline. To quote the legendary former AC Milan coach Arrigo Sacchi, who never played a game at professional level: “I never realised that to become a jockey you needed to be a horse first.”
Of course an illustrious playing career will bring a certain aura and knowledge. Just ask Franz Beckenbauer, Dalglish or indeed Zinedine Zidane. But Dave Bassett, who led clubs like Wimbledon and Sheffield United to multiple promotions in the 1980s and 1990s, used to pour scorn on the “designer managers” and warn that “caps on the table only works once”. “The second day,” he said, “you’ve got to tell them something useful.”
Gerrard and Lampard have clearly shown they have “something useful” to offer beyond their name. Gerrard led Rangers to their first Scottish league title in 10 years and pulled off some highly impressive results in the Europa League. Lampard took Derby to within one victory of promotion to the Premier League while also nurturing young players such as Mason Mount and Fikayo Tomori, a process he continued while at Chelsea, developing a younger team based on homegrown talent and also securing Champions League qualification. He helped keep Everton up last season when it was far from a foregone conclusion even before several of their rivals at the bottom of the table found form.
The problem is that the sheen from these achievements, whether tangible or intangible, never lasts long, particularly at those clubs where the next crisis is only ever a few defeats away. It is different at those smaller, upwardly mobile clubs where there is a long-term vision and a culture of improvement, but that is little help for a big-name former player because, funnily enough, part of those clubs’ ethos is about making shrewd, data-driven appointments; Brentford or Brighton would be ideal for a manager like Gerrard or Lampard, but those clubs did not get where they are by being in thrall to stardust and box-office appeal.
When you have had a top-level playing career, you go into management with the same hopes and expectations; Gerrard has never hidden his ambition to manage Liverpool one day, just as Lampard was clear about his desire to get the Chelsea job, never imagining for one second that it would come as quickly as it did.
Some within the game believe that, rather than take the Chelsea job in the summer of 2019, Lampard should have stayed at Derby and learned his trade there. But Derby was a basket-case for the next three years, as so many Championship clubs are. The Chelsea job might not have come up again. Lampard went there, gave it a go and left a positive, meaningful legacy in terms of player development. Some might feel Chelsea’s subsequent Champions League success under Tuchel reflects badly on Lampard, but nobody at the club’s academy saw it that way.
But still, it is hard to work out what comes next for Gerrard and Lampard. Both would be sure to figure in the FA’s thoughts if Gareth Southgate were to resign as England manager tomorrow, but in both cases it would involve a leap of faith — a bigger leap of faith, perhaps, than it would have done before their last job.
There will be more jobs, providing they want them. Whether sooner or later, whether in England or further afield, there will be offers to prove themselves. And maybe at this point the experience of Patrick Vieira, another of the great midfielders of the Premier League era, offers encouragement. Vieira did well at New York City but his time in charge of Nice was so underwhelming that his appointment by Crystal Palace in the summer of 2021 seemed a real gamble. And yet so far, so good; even if Palace were to lose the next five games and press the panic button, Vieira’s work, in terms of rejuvenating their squad and changing their playing style, inspires a certain confidence in his future prospects.
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Vieira was able to learn on the job, to an extent, at New York City and at Nice and then in a less-pressurised Premier League environment at Palace. It is similar, perhaps, for Vincent Kompany, who struggled early on at Anderlecht but is doing an impressive job this season at Burnley. Both are under pressure to get results, but it will not be like walking into the intensity of the Old Firm rivalry with Rangers or into a relegation battle with Everton under the chaotic Moshiri regime.
Both Gerrard and Lampard will have learned far more over the past four years than they could have imagined.
But that is another of the contradictions of the “mad life of management”. Learning experiences are almost invariably bruising experiences. Gerrard and Lampard will be wiser for what they have been through at Villa and Everton respectively. But a wiser, more experienced manager is rarely as attractive as the one who still radiates a glow from his playing days. The hardest thing of all is keeping that glow alive.
(Top photo: Nick Potts/PA Images via Getty Images)
