He will almost certainly want to move on once Mauricio Pochettino comes in and understandably so.
But Frank Lampard is on record as having no illusions - he’ll find it tough finding another job after his disappointing spell at Chelsea.
When he accepted the offer to return as interim boss on April 6 it seemed like a marriage made in heaven. The Blues’ darling and record goalscorer returning to save his club in crisis. If the south west Londoners’ underachievers would listen to anyone it would be the former England midfielder who smashed 211 goals to take Chelsea to the top of the domestic and European game.
Instead, six consecutive defeats in six before last Saturday’s win at Bournemouth left him with the worst losing record of any Chelsea boss in over 30 years.
For Lampard, after his sacking by Everton in January, the past month and a half have been disastrous.
It will never affect his legacy as a player.
The widespread feeling remains, however, that with patience a rare commodity in football, owners and chairmen will break the glass for the emergency fire-fighters such as Roy Hodgson, Sam Allardyce and Neil Warnock rather than keep faith with the younger bosses whose mistakes with their ‘L’ plates are par for the course.
Let’s not kid ourselves. Legends of the game such as John Barnes were not seen again in the dug-out after spells at Celtic and Tranmere. Sol Campbell remains out of work despite saving Macclesfield from an impossible position and the struggles at Southend being beyond his control.
It remains to be seen whether Patrick Vieira will be handed another opportunity after being sacked by Crystal Palace - even though Hodgson is currently plundering points from the same teams Vieira made hay against during the first half of the season.
Black managers will never enjoy the privilege men such as Lampard, Steven Gerrard and others of that generation will be afforded.
Yet it applies equally to all of them that to succeed, in many cases, you have to have failed in order to learn from your mistakes.
Arsene Wenger was relegated at Nancy, Sir Bobby Robson lasted barely 11 months at Fulham in his first job and Antonio Conte was twice sacked with Italian Serie B club Arezzo.
After Rafa Benitez flew the nest following a spell coaching Real Madrid’s youth teams, he was sacked by Valladolid, second-tier Osasuna and took Extremadura up and then down again before opting for a gap year.
So just as Vieira, Campbell, Barnes and others should still be in work, it shouldn’t necessarily be the case that Lampard is finished. He was tainted by Chelsea’s toxicity.
The club’s owners are learning that while their financial acumen remains impressive, football is a different beast altogether. Spending more than £600million on 18 players, resulting in a first-team squad with an unmanageable 32 players, was always going to be lunacy.
Roman Abramovich ruled Europe with the Blues because he knew how to delegate to Marina Granovskaia, Michael Emanalo and others who knew what they were doing.
Chelsea’s new owners believed, mistakenly, that they could do it all themselves and Lampard clearly chose not to rock the boat to preserve his relationship with the club.
Should he get another job it is unlikely he’d be as diplomatic.
