It was all going so well, not so long ago. Just think back to, say, late 2019. Steven Gerrard was driving Rangers toward his (and their) second straight second-place finish in Scotland. It might not seem like much, but they hadn't been that high in the SPL table since 2012, when financial mismanagement led to the club being liquidated and plunged down into the country's third division. Then, in Gerrard's third season with the club, they won the league title for the first time since 2011.
It was a similar story for Frank Lampard at Chelsea in 2019-20. They finished in fourth, which, woo hoo! But this was supposed to be a step-back season. After various violations with how Chelsea acquired academy players, FIFA gave the club a two-window transfer ban. And after seeing his one semi-successful season at Derby County in the English Championship, Chelsea gave the newly unappealing job to Lampard.
At the time, it seemed as though they were using Lampard as something of a shield. They'd just sent their most important player, Eden Hazard, to Real Madrid and would not be able to reinvest the returns. They'd recalled a bunch of loanees but weren't reloading like they normally would. Perhaps the fans wouldn't be as furious with a subpar season with their beloved Lampard on the bench. Instead, Lampard led a young, fun and exciting Chelsea squad to a fourth-place finish and a tie for the third-most points with Manchester United.
Both superstars-turned-managers were on upward trajectories, perhaps beneficiaries of the diverse managerial brainpower that came into the league right around the time when both of their playing careers started to take off. Or not.
Just a couple of years later, they're both unemployed. Lampard looks like one of the worst managers the Premier League has ever seen, while Gerrard, once a theoretical future Liverpool manager, now appears to be the only thing able to stand between Aston Villa and a top-four finish. What happened? And what can they tell us about how management works?
Lampard loves losing
One of the tricky things about judging managerial performance is that each situation is unique -- from the squad to the front-office structure. At the top end, can you really compare Jurgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola based purely on the numbers of trophies they've won? I mean, you can, but you wouldn't really be getting anywhere. No, what Guardiola has done with City's resources and Klopp has done with Liverpool's are two very different things.
You find the same problem at the other end of the spectrum. It's pretty easy to blame poor team performance on the coach, and it's much easier to replace the coach than the entire starting lineup. But we really don't know if a poor run of performance is because the coach is doing something wrong, or if it's just what the current group of players is capable of. As Leeds found out the hard way this season, you can fire a coach you're unhappy with ... and then you can replace him with a guy who makes things worse, and then replace him with another guy who's just as bad of a fit.
A way around this problem would be to look at how a team performs after a coach gets fired. The new guy gets to use the same set of players, and if he does a better job than the guy he replaced, then that tells you something, right?
Well, sort of.
Teams have a tendency to fire coaches after particularly unlucky runs of performance. They might just be underperforming their expected goals to an unsustainable degree (see, again: Leeds), or a bunch of their key players might have all played poorly at the same time for reasons both uncontrollable and unlikely to continue. In these situations, the coach who gets hired and then oversees a sudden improvement might not have fixed anything. He's just benefitting from regression to the mean.
Lampard, however, does not appear to be a victim of this phenomenon at all. Let's just take his three most recent managerial appointments.
Despite a successful first campaign, Lampard was fired midway through his second season with Chelsea. The club were ninth in the table, but they did have the third-best xG differential in the league at the time. It seemed like a classic case of a coach getting canned because the vagaries of finishing weren't going his way, but then Thomas Tuchel took over, Chelsea won the second-most points in the league over the rest of the season, and -- oh yeah -- they won the Champions League. Their per-game non-penalty xG differential improved from plus-0.48 under Lampard to plus-0.98 under Tuchel.
Not great! But also not irrefutable proof that Lampard would make your team worse. Maybe he was just an average Premier League manager, and he'd been replaced by one of the best in the world. Could've been ... until this season. When Lampard was sacked by Everton midway through this year, the Sporting Index betting market projected the club to finish on 32 points. After Sean Dyche took over, Everton finished with 36.
It gets much worse, though. Lampard was then given the caretaker reins at Chelsea after Graham Potter was fired. The market projected Chelsea to finish on 53 points ... and then Lampard guided them to a cool 44 points, nine points below expectation despite his coaching only a handful of matches.
Lampard managed 29 games for two different clubs last season. Extrapolated out to a 38-match rate, his teams, neither of which was relegated, would've won 26 points. Only Southampton had fewer points last season.
Don't let Unai Emery take your job
It's not as bad for Gerrard, but it actually looks even worse. He was hired by Aston Villa in November of 2021 and let go nearly a year later. When he was fired, the betting markets projected Villa to finish the season with 41 points. After hiring Unai Emery, they finished with 61.
To put that in some context: Manchester City won the league with 89 points. If we assume that all 11 slots in the lineup performed equally important roles throughout the season -- which they didn't, but just go with me for a second -- then each City starter produced 8.1 points of value over the course of the season. Last-place Southampton finished with 25 points, which puts each starter at 2.3 points. In other words, the difference in "value" between the average City starter and the average Southampton starter this season was a little less than six points. The difference between Gerrard and Emery was 20 points.
Of course, that's not quite right, for all the reasons already outlined. In nine games this season, Gerrard's team scored just seven goals from 12.5 xG. He got fired after an unlucky run, but the team also did materially improve under Emery, as this graphic shows:
The ups & downs of changing your #PremierLeague manager in 22/23. SOS corrected #xG differential before & after managerial change. Upbeat for #LCFC #CPFC #CFC #AVFC #EFC #AFCB Downturns for #CFC again #LUFC #SaintsFC #WWFC Slope graph data from @InfogolApp pic.twitter.com/fN4yKWLg60
— mark taylor (@MarkTaylor0) May 19, 2023
And so the two star midfielders who could never play together are both currently jobless, without much of a reputation remaining.
How Lampard and Gerrard explain everything wrong with how managers get hired
Lampard's teams performed so poorly that it was impossible for anyone who watched the Premier League to avoid seeing it. He has become a symbol for everything that's wrong with the managerial pipeline: a famous, underqualified white ex-player who keeps getting cushy jobs despite mounting evidence that he doesn't deserve them.
The majority of the managerial pool in England is composed of former players who frequently seem to move up, down and across the competitive ladder at random. According to a 2014 survey of previous literature on the manager role in the Journal of Sport Management:
"[Football] management is seen as a career, in which institutional barriers in the shape of prior playing experience continue to be seen as important. Although the concept of a career embraces the notion of development and of progression, with some logic to the linkages between positions over time, in much of professional football this simply does not apply ... It remains the case that there is often little apparent logic to an individual's progression to a manager's position or at times their readiness for this progression."
And although managerial hiring is massively biased toward former players in general, that hasn't applied to Black players in particular. After Patrick Vieira was fired by Crystal Palace a few months ago, there are now zero Black Premier League managers. As of 2021, 43% of current Premier League players were Black. By the end of the 2022 season, according to the Black Footballers Partnership, there had been only 28 Black managers across the history of the English professional game.
Gerrard is symbolic of the same problems, if to a lesser degree. Unlike Lampard, who was given one of the biggest jobs in world soccer after a single decent season of managing the sixth-best team in the Championship, Gerrard started off in the Liverpool academy, then moved to Rangers and then to Villa. There were at least some minor checkpoints along the way where he had to prove himself, and because of that, he's much more likely to have a successful managerial career from here on out than Lampard is. That said, he still never would've had any of those opportunities if his name wasn't Steven Gerrard.
Although the near-immediate successes of Pep Guardiola, Zinedine Zidane and, to a lesser extent, Xavi and Mikel Arteta, won't persuade clubs to do otherwise, there's just a truly broken logic behind all of this, too. If you're trying to find the best manager for your team, and you can choose from a massive pool of potential interested people with all kinds of different backgrounds and experiences across the world, what are the chances that the best options will always come from a tiny, specific pool of specifically inexperienced former players?