Frank Lampard alleges he pressed Chelsea to recruit Jude Bellingham only to be turned down.
Chelsea’s all-time leading scorer admits he was “desperate” to bring a 16-year-old Bellingham from Birmingham to Stamford Bridge during his first stint as manager.
While Lampard was ushering in a short-lived youth revolution at Chelsea, relying largely on academy graduates such as Mason Mount, Tamara Abraham, and Fikayo Tomori (none of whom remain at the club), Bellingham would have been unlikely to make the move to West London in the first place.Reported by mirror
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“When I was managing at Chelsea, I was desperate to bring Jude Bellingham in,” Lampard told former teammate John Obi Mikel on his podcast. But I couldn’t get it through upstairs – spending £20 million for someone his age.”
Lampard has previously stated that he attempted to sign Erling Haaland only for the club’s board, which has all departed after the change in ownership, to be uninterested in a transaction.
Lampard revealed late last season, during his disastrous second time as temporary manager, that he was “pushing big” to recruit the Norwegian for 2020.
“I don’t know whether he would have decided to come here anyway but I was a big fan of that [signing Haaland],” Lampard said. “There are some of those that happen, aren’t there, that people know about or it could have been this way.
“People talk a lot about mistakes or things that could have been in football. Whether he would have come here, I don’t know but I was pushing big and on a few other players at the time.
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