Author, singer, artists, footballers: Chelsea players’ off-pitch talents and pursuits

Chelsea players are published authors, concert musicians, television writers and gallery-auction artists. We take a look at how some of them spend their down time.

The trend in modern football is for players who are not constrained by the traditional boundaries of their position. Ball-playing goalkeepers, centre-backs who can dribble through midfield, N’Golo Kante as a box-to-box midfielder… Many players are even more versatile off the pitch. As N’Golo Kante, Frank Lampard, Dennis Wise and Antonio Conte have their artwork go up on the auction block for the Willow Foundation’s Stars on Canvas, here’s a look at some off-pitch talents from other Chelsea players.

1. Frank Lampard: Box-to-box children’s author

The archetypal box-to-box midfielder, Frank Lampard’s venture into extra-curricular activity saw him release a series of children’s football stories imaginatively centred around a character called “Frankie.” Little Frankie gets himself into the usual scrapes a young budding footballer does, but Super Frank – the real-life one – guides him along the right route in both footballing and social ways.

Frank was always an A* student through school and busted the myth that footballers are one brick short of a wall. He left school with 10 GCSE’s and achieving an IQ score of 150, putting him in the top 1% of the population. Having written his autobiography in 2006, he formulated the characters for a series of books called Frankie’s Magic Football. It was an idea he sat on for quite a while before finally bringing the plan to life.

By his own admission, Frank found writing for children difficult and needed the help of an editor to pull together all his thoughts and characters. Nonetheless, it adds yet another string to the current Derby County manager’s ever expanding bow.

"I couldn’t, to be honest, finish a complete book. It’s very difficult for me to write a kids’ book. I basically have the characters that I’ve come up with and the storylines, so once I get through that I normally write a whole list of the story and where it goes, then at the end I sit down with Mike (his editor) and he will help me with how you put it together. – The Guardian"

Lampard may not be the next JK Rowling, but if little Frankie has half as good a career as his author, kids around the world can look forward to a long series of books.