In the breakout room overlooking Coventry City’s Sky Lodge training ground — where there are sofas, a table tennis table, a dartboard and a big screen for an Xbox — Frank Lampard is reflecting with The Athletic about leading his side to the Championship title.

“There’s a general misconception with British managers — because the British public have lived and breathed us as players — that if we’re ex-players, we get jobs because of our playing careers. We go and cheerlead a group or try to create a vibe like the old days we might have had and we just go, ‘Go on, lads, out you go and play’.

“I’m hoping that if people will analyse the work we’ve done this year, they won’t just say, ‘Oh look, Frank got the team in a really good place, they all get on and there’s great spirit’. That doesn’t win you everything. You have to be tactically on point, you have to be clear with the players, they have to buy into what you’re trying to do. And we work a lot on that.”

For Lampard, it’s been a remarkable redemption arc. His Coventry side have dominated the league this campaign, finishing with 95 points, and scoring 97 goals in their 46 matches.

They secured promotion with a late draw away at Blackburn Rovers last month in front of 7,500 joyous Coventry fans, who have seen their club drop to the fourth tier and groundshare with Northampton Town and Birmingham City in the last quarter of a century.

That saw Coventry return to the Premier League after a 25-year absence.

Where does Coventry’s promotion rank in Lampard’s list of career achievements?

“It’s right at the top,” he replies earnestly. “It’s not to say it overrides personal playing achievements because they’re amazing.

“But as a manager, you have much more responsibility, much more on your shoulders. So when you do it here — like we have this year with the team, which has achieved to its absolute maximum to get to where it’s got to — you get a real feeling of pleasure from the work done. So it’s right at the top, alongside other things that I may have done.”

Lampard said his time with Coventry — the fourth club he has managed — had taught him to remain calmer with the highs and lows of results and to have more confidence in his work, as that rubs off on the players.

When Lampard arrived at the club in November 2024, they were 17th in the table, two points above the relegation zone, but it was a talented squad that had reached the play-off final the season before under popular and longstanding former manager Mark Robins.

On taking the job, Lampard, who drove up to Coventry in a people carrier with his trusted assistants Joe Edwards and Chris Jones, described it as “a slight step into the unknown”.

They knew they had to restore players’ confidence quickly and identified tactical elements to improve.

It had the desired effect, as Coventry rose from 17th to fifth, before gut-wrenchingly losing to Sunderland in the 122nd minute of the play-off semi-final second leg. Instead of wallowing in that setback, however, they used it as motivation for this season.

Lampard also joined Coventry with a point to prove, following a bruising last spell at Chelsea in a caretaker role when he won one match in 11 games and was ridiculed by opposition fans, while former players Jermaine Pennant and Jamie O’Hara debated on talkSPORT whether he was the “worst manager in Premier League history”.

The resilience he developed in his playing days came to the fore. “Particularly in management, particularly in the modern day of social media and reaction, everything’s very much in your face,” Lampard, who featured 648 times for Chelsea, scoring 211 goals, says. “After Chelsea, I had a point to prove because I don’t think any reaction to that was fair, and I’m being honest, and I’m as self-critical as anybody.

Lampard with Conor Gallagher during his time as caretaker Chelsea manager in 2023 (Photo: Bryn Lennon/Getty Images)

“The Chelsea period of six, seven weeks, I went into a club which was my club in effect, and it was completely different, the motivation had gone. Some players were not playing for different reasons, injuries, or they were going to move in the summer. It was a great, tight learning curve, that when those things were all going on, it’s really hard to win football games. And when you are an interim manager, there’s only so much you can affect in that short time.

“I came out of it a little bit tougher, but with a little more clarity that if I’m going to make my next decision, it has to be a really, really good footballing decision that I can affect positively. And then you just hope that if you work well, you can start answering those questions. But you can’t spend your life trying to prove people wrong all the time because you won’t prove everybody wrong. But it’s not a bad drive to have in the back of your head.”

That ethos and inner steel have stuck with Lampard from his playing career, where he faced accusations of nepotism at West Ham United and jibes about his weight, to become one of the country’s greatest midfielders.

“I know from my playing career, through my managerial career, I’ve learned to have a tough skin, a tough nature,” Lampard, dressed in Coventry’s Hummel training kit, continues.

Lampard says he wants to be authentic as a manager, while citing the influence of the likes of Carlo Ancelotti and Jose Mourinho.

“I worked with Carlo Ancelotti and, for me, he was one of the best at being just really calm through everything and when I look back, I loved that because it made me feel good, I could just get on with my job.

“And you’ve got to be very authentic yourself. Like, if I try to take something from Jose Mourinho, I can’t take all his character because he’s a one-off. I remember how Carlo made me feel, for example, I remembered Jose’s tactical detail. I remember Jose really gave off a feeling that you hate losing and we’re a winning machine, he brought that confidence in.”

The 47-year-old says Coventry gave him the stable platform he craved after inheriting testing situations in his previous two jobs. Before Chelsea, he was mired in a relegation fight at Everton, eventually steering them to safety in his first season against a backdrop of angry protests against the board and issues with financial fair play rules. Lampard, who prefers not to discuss the state of his former club after they recently sacked Liam Rosenior, believes the setbacks of losing those jobs also helped build character.

But now it is time to look forward. After celebrating Coventry’s title victory at a raucous parade on Monday, Lampard will take some time off before attention turns to next season, when keeping Coventry in the top flight could, he says, be a tougher task than promotion.

Matt Grimes and Lampard on the trophy parade (Cameron Smith/Getty Images)

“I understand the Premier League, I’ve got experience of it, I know the levels, these boys have got to a great level in this league and it’s a massive achievement,” he said. “But we’ve seen so many stories of teams that go up and come down, and that just shows you the job that’s in hand and that’s why everyone has to do almost a perfect job, getting everything as bright as can be. It’ll be hard.”

Recruitment will be crucial, says the former midfielder, while also being mindful of his existing players.

Many of Coventry’s squad have come through the divisions of English football, including star winger Ephron Mason-Clark, who started at Barnet and even had a spell on loan at Metropolitan Police FC in the seventh tier. Lampard said their humility meant they were often the easiest players to work with.

Ephron Mason-Clark starred for Coventry this season (George Wood/Getty Images)

At Coventry, Lampard has built a strong rapport with the fans — and was even invited to a supporter’s wedding before their match against Derby County on Good Friday — a gesture he appreciated but had to decline.

Does he see himself at Coventry for the long term?

“I love working here, it’s been an amazing 18 months,” Lampard replies. “We’ve got a lot of work this summer because I’m also ambitious and want to do well. The level’s going up, and I understand that.

“We will start talking as a club about what (the challenge of the Premier League) looks like, because there are also things we can improve to help support the players.

“It’s hard to say how long you’re going to be a manager. I remember distinctly at Chelsea being top of the league in December and at home and out of the job at the end of January, that’s football, that’s a manager’s life, so I always try and focus on the short term.”

Lampard says the Premier League is more structured than the chaos of the Championship, but the challenge is to stop moments of high individual quality. He said his Coventry team had already shown adaptability and would need to demonstrate that again in different ways next season, without losing their aggressive edge.

As for the summer, Lampard will also be watching the World Cup with interest and believes England have a good chance if their best players perform at their best.

“I understand the pressures and the levels of it, so I’ll be interested to see the styles of teams and the heat and how teams handle all the different elements of that,” he says. “And with England, I wish them well. It’s a talented squad, but I know how hard it is.”

In October, Steven Gerrard made headlines when he referred to England’s ‘Golden Generation’ as “egotistical losers” in an interview with Rio Ferdinand.

Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard train on England duty before the 2014 World Cup in Brazil (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)

What did Lampard make of those comments?

“I understood his point and it got picked up on because that’s quite a nice headline, it’s a nice phrase to talk about egos,” he said. “To be a top professional football player, you have to have an ego.

“So that’s no problem and factually we didn’t win a World Cup, so you can probably say, ‘Well, there it is’, but there were probably, as well, different elements to it where you look back and people talk loads about ‘Chelsea sat there’ and ‘Manchester United sat there’. That did happen, but I don’t think it’s the exact reason we didn’t win football games. So with reflection, I try not to hang on that one too much.”

For Lampard, his primary focus now is to build on this season’s success, as he prepares for a Premier League return, and his personal goal is clear.

“I want to be the best I possibly can be.”