Frank Lampard: Balancing Jose Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti in Management

Frank Lampard leans back in his chair, smiles and sums himself up in two names.

“Jose and Carlo are like both sides of the coin,” he tells BBC Sport. “I’m probably somewhere in the middle.”

Eight years into his managerial career, the Coventry City boss is still shaped by the men who once shouted instructions to him from the touchline. Jose Mourinho. Carlo Ancelotti. Guus Hiddink. Rafael Benitez. And, of course, his uncle Harry Redknapp.

Now 48, Lampard sits down with musician and Sky Blues fan Tom Grennan for 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. The subject is supposed to be Coventry’s return to the top flight. It quickly becomes a study in how a serial winner has tried to rebuild his own reputation.

Between Jose and Carlo

Lampard played his best football under Mourinho and Ancelotti at Chelsea, winning Premier League titles and FA Cups with both. Those years still frame how he manages.

“Jose was very on you, he transmitted his self-confidence,” Lampard says. “But if you stepped out of line or did something wrong, you’d feel the strength of him.

“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.”

He pauses, then adds: “I start to sometimes go towards being Jose, sometimes I go and be a bit more Carlo.”

That tension defines his touchline persona. He admits he arrived in management convinced he had to be the disciplinarian.

“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,” he says. “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 is deliberate. The stakes are not abstract. Coventry are back in the Premier League for the first time in 25 years and Lampard knows exactly what that spotlight feels like.

Mixed past, new platform

Coventry’s promotion last season – 95 points, Championship title secured after he took over in November 2024 – has reset the conversation around Lampard. Before that, his managerial CV looked like a rollercoaster.

At Derby County in 2018, he guided the club to the Championship play-off final, only to lose to Aston Villa. At Chelsea, the club where he became a legend as a player, he lasted 18 months as manager before being sacked in January 2021. At Everton, the axe fell again, this time in January 2023, less than a year into the job.

He does not pretend the criticism vanished with one promotion.

“My personal ambition to prove any doubters wrong is sort of always there,” he says. “But I try not to let that be my driver.

“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.

“You’ve got to be careful trying to prove every doubter wrong, because it’s not possible.”

Lampard has lived this cycle longer than most. As a player, he won three Premier League titles, the Champions League in 2012, four FA Cups, two League Cups and the Europa League. He knows what the top looks like. He also knows how unforgiving it can be.

“I’ve been in the Premier League as a player, I’ve been as a manager, I understand the challenge of it,” he says. “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.”

Promotion that rivals Munich

For a man who lifted the Champions League trophy in Munich, it takes something special to be mentioned in the same breath. Coventry’s promotion is that something.

“When you get promoted, it’s hard to balance against winning the Champions League with Chelsea,” Lampard admits.

“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.”

That emotional surge reflects the scale of Coventry’s journey back. Financial crises, exile from their home city, years of drifting outside the elite. Lampard walked into a club carrying scars and helped turn that weight into momentum.

Now comes the hard part: staying up.

Facing the Premier League reality

Coventry’s first taste of the new season was brutal. A 3-0 defeat to champions Arsenal underlined the gap between dominating the Championship and surviving in the Premier League.

Lampard knows they cannot simply roll out last year’s blueprint.

“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 message is clear: adapt or get punished, especially defensively. The ball will be lost quicker, the mistakes will be seized upon, the margin for error shrinks to almost nothing.

So what does success look like? The obvious question comes, and he answers it before it is finished.

“Everyone’s going to ask me, ‘staying in the league, is that your target?’” Lampard 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.”

Coventry’s first home game of the campaign comes against fellow promoted side Hull City on Saturday. The champions have already exposed the scale of the step up. Now Lampard’s “middle ground” between Jose and Carlo faces its first real test in front of a fanbase that has waited a quarter of a century to see Premier League football return.

Bravery, or caution? Trust, or toughness? The next nine months will reveal which side of that coin shines brightest.