Chelsea’s former player and manager, Frank Lampard, has spoken out against the transfer strategy employed by the club’s co-owner, Todd Boehly.
Since his takeover in 2022, Boehly has spent over £1 billion in the transfer market, focusing on bringing in young players like Enzo Fernandez, Moises Caicedo, Cole Palmer, and Mykhailo Mudryk, while experienced players like Jorginho, N’Golo Kante, and Mateo Kovacic have been sold.
Lampard, who managed Chelsea briefly during Boehly’s tenure, has criticized this strategy, questioning the collective age of the signings and the impact it has had on the team’s standards.
He urged caution in bringing in too many young players at once and called for greater attention to the underlying aspects of the club’s performance.
“I said it quite a lot when I was there and people threw it back at me, I was like: ‘Standards have not been good enough here’. You have to have a level of standards to be a top club. Forget about the tactics of the layer on top, things below have to be right to perform, and I didn’t see it there,” Lampard said on Unfiltered podcast (via GOAL).
“The strategy has been to bring in young players, you have got young kids coming over at 21 from another country, trying to fit into a team. To ask a lot of players to do that at the same time and develop is not an easy thing.
“So I think be very careful, I think the strategy of course will be questioned, and I think there have been things done that you kind of look now and ask if it could have been different, yes.”