Chelsea manager Frank Lampard says he is judged differently to other managers

Chelsea manager Frank Lampard has said that he believes he is not judged in the same way as other managers have been. Lampard also said that those close to him even questioned his decision to accept the Chelsea head coach's role at the beginning of the 2019-20 season.

Lampard had just a solitary year of experience as a head coach before taking the Chelsea job. He guided Derby County to the Championship Playoff Final in 2019, but they couldn't get the job done, losing to Aston Villa.

Lampard had a challenging start to life at Chelsea as well, with a transfer ban in place, ensuring that he could not sign the players that he wanted.

However, after Chelsea finished fourth in the Premier League, Lampard was duly backed by owner Roman Abramovich in the summer of 2020, with Chelsea spending in excess of £200m on new players.

In the pre-match press conference ahead of Chelsea's UEFA Champions League game against FC Krasnodar, Lampard said that he felt he was judged differently to other manager.

"I think possibly, yes; I think when I got this job a lot of people were questioning me getting the job.

"A lot of people told me 'are you sure you want to take it' because of maybe opinion. And I think when sometimes people can be very quick to form opinions straight away, for whatever reason, and being a young English manager with one year at Derby.

"But at the same time I think sometimes we just have to judge people on face value, like we do judge any manager; it doesn't matter where you're from, I think all managers should be judged the same.

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Frank Lampard says he's proud of Chelsea achievements last season

Lampard also said that the last season could have gone better for Chelsea, but he was pleased with the way they came through it.

"I was pretty proud of what we managed to achieve last season in terms of coming in the top four, in fact I thought we could have actually done even better than that for different reasons. But I was happy with that," he said.

"I can't get swung on opinion though, because if you do that managing a Premier League team if you look at opinion and read and listen to everything, it will affect you every day.

"So I just have to do the job as well as I can. And hopefully, the opinions will speak for themselves.

"I'm certainly very pleased I took the job. I'm very proud to manage this club every day."