SPEND IT LIKE LAMPS
Chelsea boss Frank Lampard plotting £150MILLION January spending spree – with Leicester City’s Ben Chilwell on his radar
FRANK LAMPARD already has targets in mind as he prepares to hit the January sales armed with £150million.
Chelsea succeeded in a battle to have their ban on signing players halved on appeal, leaving them free to bring new faces in next month.
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Now boss Lampard will spend the next few weeks working with director Marina Granovskaia and owner Roman Abramovich to settle on who they should be.
Leicester left-back Ben Chilwell is one of those who has caught the eye, while a back-up striker could also been drafted in.
And Lampard said: “I have ideas of players in my mind.
“But at the same time it’s so fluid because my feelings are on my players now, how they train — and how they perform.
“Every manager in the Premier League would be lying if they said they weren’t thinking about anything else. Now we know, from today there will be conversations.
“We have a scouting department, we have people working on this all the time, whether the ban was here or not.
“It’s not now everyone will just run to computers and start Googling the best players we can buy!
“We’re always ready to move forward, so it’s part of the big picture.
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“Every big team buys. It’s the competitive nature of the Premier League. Look at what Manchester United have spent in recent years, City, Tottenham last summer and Arsenal. We sometimes get a finger pointed at us
because people are still thinking about when Roman Abramovich turned up at the club — but every club is buying.
“We have managed to utilise what has gone into the academy over the last 15 or so years, it’s great to see that coming through in one go.
“But I do think we are slightly fixated on the young players and, ‘Will it affect them?’
“It’s more considering positions, the quality level of who we might bring in and will they improve it?
“I have a really good relationship with the owner and with Marina.
“So I respect that relationship on their side and I respect what Roman Abramovich has done for this club — because I’m part of it. I just put forward my case of what I think will improve us, hopefully we’ll make the move
from there.”
Chelsea’s supporters have revelled in the way so many players from the academy have come through over the past 18 months.
They now sing “We’ve got our Chelsea back.”
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Lampard stressed: “They won’t lose that feeling for the young players, they are here to stay.
“And the young players beneath that, if they train well enough and show enough then they’ll get their opportunities, that’s how I am.
“If we’re going to do something, it will be to improve the squad.
“We’re not going to line up Mason Mount, Tammy Abraham, Reece James and sell them.”
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