Frank Lampard: Blending Jose Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti at Coventry City
Frank Lampard has spent a lifetime listening to great managers. Now he is trying to blend two of the very best.
On the second episode of The Football Interview, airing on BBC One at 12:45 every Saturday during the Premier League season and available on BBC iPlayer, BBC Football YouTube and the BBC Sport website and app, Coventry City’s manager sits down with musician and Sky Blues fan Tom Grennan to explain how Jose Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti still shape everything he does.
‘Jose and Carlo are like both sides of the coin’
Lampard doesn’t hesitate when asked who has influenced him most.
“Jose and Carlo are like both sides of the coin,” the 48-year-old tells BBC Sport.
He knows both sides well. He played under Mourinho and Ancelotti at Chelsea, winning Premier League titles and FA Cups with each of them. He felt the heat and the calm, often in the same season.
“Jose was very on you, he transmitted his self-confidence, but if you stepped out of line or did something wrong, you'd feel the strength of him,” Lampard says. “Whereas Carlo was chilled and calm. When you look back, you go, ‘that's a nice environment to work in’. It felt like he trusted you. So I try and take little snippets. I'm probably somewhere in the middle.”
Eight years into his own managerial career, that “middle” is what he is searching for at Coventry, a club he has just dragged back into the Premier League for the first time in 25 years.
“I start to sometimes go towards being Jose, sometimes I go and be a bit more Carlo,” he admits.
The lesson, he says, has been to step away from the instinct to come in hard, to prove authority at every turn.
“I've learnt that young managers, you come in and feel like you have to criticise a bad performance or say something about an individual that turns up late. The more I've done this job, I realise that they're all humans.
“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.”
The balance he once felt as a player, he now tries to recreate as a boss.
From mixed spells to a title with Coventry
Lampard’s path to Coventry has been anything but smooth. After retiring from a glittering playing career – three Premier League titles, the Champions League in 2012, four FA Cups, two League Cups and the Europa League – his early years in the dugout were a crash course in the brutality of the job.
He impressed at Derby County in 2018, taking them to the Championship play-off final before losing to Aston Villa. That earned him a return to Chelsea, this time as manager, but the spell ended after 18 months with his sacking in January 2021. A difficult stint at Everton followed, cut short in January 2023.
It was a “mixed bag” by any measure. Then came Coventry.
Taking over in November 2024, Lampard powered the Sky Blues to the Championship title with 95 points. The club’s long, painful exile from the top flight ended under his watch.
He ranks that promotion alongside his greatest nights as a player.
“When you get promoted, it's hard to balance against winning the Champions League with Chelsea,” he says. “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.”
Blocking out the noise
Modern football never stops judging. Lampard knows that better than most.
“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 tells Grennan.
He is clear about one thing: chasing every critic is a trap.
“You've got to be careful trying to prove every doubter wrong, because it's not possible,” he says.
“My personal ambition to prove any doubters wrong is sort of always there, but I try not to let that be my driver.
“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 message is as much to himself as to his players. Coventry are back among the elite. The scrutiny will follow.
‘We’d be fools’ – adapting to the Premier League
Coventry’s return to the top flight started with a jolt: a 3-0 defeat to champions Arsenal on the opening weekend. The gap between the Championship and the Premier League was laid bare in 90 minutes.
Lampard knows last season’s dominance cannot simply be rolled over into this campaign.
“We want to keep hold of the good things from last year,” he says. “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 shift, he insists, starts with what they do without the ball.
He talks of adapting “especially defensively”, of understanding that Coventry will have to suffer for spells, survive waves of pressure, then show enough quality and courage when their moments come.
Brave, not timid
Ambition for the season? Lampard doesn’t hide from the obvious question.
“Everyone's going to ask me, ‘staying in the league, is that your target?’” he says.
“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’.
“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.”
That is the Lampard blend in a sentence. A little Mourinho steel. A little Ancelotti calm. A demand for standards, wrapped in trust.
Coventry face fellow promoted side Hull City on Saturday in their first home game of the campaign. The Premier League will not wait for them to settle.
Lampard has his blueprint. Now we find out if his middle ground between Jose and Carlo is enough to keep Coventry where they fought so hard to return.
