Will Lampard’s youthful revolution be swept away by impatient Roman?
BACK in 2008 when Frank Arnesen was sporting director at Chelsea, he proudly held forth at a conference about the investment the club were making in their academy.
A slick PowerPoint presentation illustrated how they had overhauled the previous youth system and were now scouting and developing the best players around Europe. Conspicuous by his absence in that presentation was Chelsea’s captain at the time and one of their greatest-ever players, even though he was an academy graduate. John Terry’s face didn’t quite fit. He had been raised at Chelsea prior to the Roman Abramovich era and the Arnesen revolution — and therefore was seemingly airbrushed out of the history as part of the old era.
To be fair to Arnesen, who had established his reputation raising up young players at PSV Eindhoven, these were early days. But it jarred over the coming years when Chelsea would boast about their academy, which between 2010 to 2018 won the FA Youth Cup seven times: the one shining star from that academy, the club captain, preceded those times, while the players coming through under the all-new reformed system would invariably be loaned to Vitesse Arnhem and never be heard of again.
Still, Arensen’s reasoning wasn’t wrong. He explained that the era of Abramovich splashing millions in the transfer market had to be replaced with a more balanced model, whereby Chelsea would train up their own stars. It was quite an ambitious cultural shift.
For years we waited for the Arnesen vision to come to fruition. The Dane himself would leave the club in 2010. Quietly, behind the scenes, someone was picking up his vision and moulding it into something tangible. Ironically, it was one of the youth coaches who had been at Chelsea since 1993, and so was part of the old era and Terry’s cohort, Neil Bath.
As academy director, he began to produce some of the best young players in Europe. Yet they never quite seemed to make the grade.
Which is why it isn’t always appreciated what a quantum leap Frank Lampard has initiated at the club. Today, in the FA Cup fourthround tie against Luton, we may see some of Chelsea’s next generation, such as winger Tino Anjorin.
If Lampard does keep his job into next season, it would be fitting if he were the man to pick that team.
Asked about the number of players he has blooded and developed, Lampard said: ‘I’m proud of that. I mentioned it a lot last year, that I didn’t want us to become an academy club, I wanted us to win things and achieve
things. But when I came back here, I made the conscious decision to look at the younger players and to give them the opportunity to show that they can get in the team.
‘Now, Mason Mount gets in midfield last year ahead of seasoned internationals, and Tammy Abraham, similarly Fikayo Tomori, Billy Gilmour when he comes into the team.
‘It’s double-edged, in that I trust in them and they produced for the team, so they should take a lot of credit for that as well.’
The irony is that after a summer of heavy spending, it is the inability of top signings Kai Havertz and Timo Werner to integrate into the team which may end up costing Lampard his job.
In this bleak spell, Mount and Abraham have been to the fore, with Callum Hudson-Odoi beginning to shine again.
That won’t save Lampard in the long run if results don’t improve. But it ought at least to be at the forefront of Abramovich’s mind when he weighs up the pros and cons of whether to stick or twist.