Frank Lampard says Chelsea could learn from Arsenal’s rebuild after a dismal season that has left the club in the bottom half of the Premier League table.
The Blues dropped into 12th place this weekend ahead of a trip to face Mikel Arteta’s title challengers at the Emirates Stadium.
The caretaker manager has lost five in a row since coming in for Graham Potter last month and could become the first manager to lose six consecutive games in west London for over a decade.
Speaking ahead of the trip across the capital, Lampard believes that the Gunners’ rise from similar depths to contenders, as shown in their All or Nothing docuseries on Amazon Prime, is relevant to Chelsea’s own struggles.
He said: “It’s interesting to compare the Arsenal story. We all had a little insight in the Amazon series.
“When you see what they are producing now and myself as a football person, the interesting thing about watching the series and before that I went up against Mikel [and won] at Chelsea in my first year, there is a long process to get to where you want to get to.
“I remember playing against Mikel’s teams in the early stages which were sometimes five at the back, sometimes four, sometimes they build with a four and defend with a five.
“Now they have a very, very clear identity, and they’ve had a clear, through recruitment, change of squad. Other than maybe the players that have come through, and you always need academy players to come through with a high level and they’ve had that.
“There has been a lot of work to that, through Mikel, through the team, through alignment, through good recruitment. If we talk about it as just happening this season, it’s come overnight. I think you go back to the beginning and all those tougher periods.
“Do we have the possibility to do that? Yes. Will it take a lot of time and good decisions along the way? Absolutely yes. You can get there.
“Those things have been a credit to Arsenal because I saw and you remember the times when the manager was being questioned, the owners were being questioned and players were being questioned. That process can take two or three years, which it has done.
“Within that two or three years you have to make a lot of right decisions and keep working in a good way. To be fair, from the coaching side, it’s great to see a club stick with a manager when maybe at another club they may have changed a manager two or three times.
“They’re a great example of that done well and part of the answer to why they are where they are now, alongside very good coaching and good players.”
Kai Havertz returns from a knee injury but Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, who played well in his 45-minute cameo against Brentford, is pushing for his first start in months.
He added: “We’ll see. I’ve got Auba, Kai and David Fofana. I am not going to divulge the team here but they are all ready.”
Lampard was further pressed whether Aubameyang might have extra motivation against a club that let him join Barcelona for free after he fell out with the coach Arteta, adding: “Not really, but, well, possibly.
“You sometimes think a player going back to their old club gets extra motivation. I haven’t delved into that with Auba so much but I will pick that position on feeling and what the team structure looks like.”
