How will Frank Lampard cope with Everton ambitions beyond mere survival?

Frank Lampard has had a stop-start managerial career and Everton have a stop-start managerial history. Will they benefit from this long summer?

Over the course of the second half of last season, a lot of barbs were thrown in the directions of the Everton manager Frank Lampard. This surprised nobody. The suspicion remains that he is the Little Lord Fauntleroy of the Premier League, parachuted into several prestigious positions on the basis of his name and his reputation as a player rather than anything he’d done during his brief and not especially successful managerial career.

But this overlooks a couple of key points. Firstly, it’s fair to say that Lampard’s previous appointments in England have been at clubs in unusual positions. At Derby County, he was tasked with the job of getting the club into the Premier League from a division in which it’s not difficult to smell the desperation of a club seeking to get there off the back of the reckless spending of former owner Mel Morris.

At Chelsea, the feeling that he’d been hired for the feels remained strong, but he did a decent enough job in his first season, while the club was under a transfer embargo, and considering just how trigger-happy Chelsea had been over the years of Roman Abramovich’s ownership, it might well be argued that there’s never too much embarrassment at getting sacked by this particular club.

And there were mitigating circumstances surrounding his arrival at Everton. There was little opportunity to strengthen a dysfunctional squad which had in previous years come to resemble the financial mess that was going on behind the scenes at the club. Everton’s first-team squad had become a patchwork quilt of the failed dreams of his predecessors in the position, a tribute to muddle-headedness and incoherence that so many of the club’s strategies had become under Farhad Moshiri.

And things were about to get worse for both Lampard and Everton. The role of Alisher Usmanov as a ‘sponsor’ of the club always felt shrouded in some degree of mystery on account of the close relationship between the owner of the club and the sponsor. But when Russian tanks rolled over the border into Ukraine in February, the writing was on the wall for that source of ready income. The names of Usmanov’s companies were taken down from the hoardings at Goodison Park and plans for the club’s new stadium at Bramley-Moore Dock had to be re-evaluated and refinanced.

The removal of Usmanov might not…