Frank James Lampard (born 20 June 1978) is an English footballer who plays for Premier League club Chelsea and the England national team. He plays most often as a box-to-box midfielder and has also enjoyed spells in a more advanced attacking midfield role. Lampard is Chelsea's top active goalscorer with 136 goals, the most in club history for a midfielder, and is the highest goal-scoring midfielder in Premier League history with 111 league goals in total, he is also 2nd in the all-time Premier League assists table with 71. Lampard established himself as one of the best midfielders in the world by coming second in both FIFA World Player of the Year and the Ballon d'Or in 2005.Lampard began his career at West Ham United, his father's former club. Joining the youth team in 1994, he had secured a place in the first team by the 1997–1998 season. He helped the team to their highest ever finishing position Premier League in the 1998–99 season. The following season Lampard scored 14 goals in all competitions from midfield. With progress stagnating at West Ham, he moved to rival London club Chelsea in 2001 for £11 million.
From his debut onwards he was ever-present in the Chelsea first team, setting a record 164 consecutive Premier League appearances. He established himself as a prolific scorer at the West London club and won his first major honours in 2005, winning the Premier League and League Cup. Lampard won more club honours under coach Jose Mourinho; the 2005–06 Premier League title and a domestic cup double in 2007. He signed a new contract in 2008, becoming the highest paid Premier League footballer at that time, and scored in his first Champions League Final that same year. He won the FA cup for the second time in the 2009 final in which he scored the winning goal.Internationally, Lampard gained his first senior England cap in 1999 team and has played in Euro 2004 (scoring three goals in four games), the 2006 World Cup and the Euro 2008 qualifiers. He has two children, Luna and Isla, with Elen Rives.
Biography:Born in Romford, London, Frank Lampard is the son of Frank Lampard, Sr., a former England fullback and two-time FA Cup winner with West Ham United. His mother, Pat, died of pneumonia on 24 April 2008, and since her death his goal celebration has consisted of pointing to the sky and looking upwards as a tribute. His uncle is Tottenham Hotspur coach Harry Redknapp, and his cousin, Jamie Redknapp, spent twelve seasons with Liverpool and earned 17 caps for England before retiring in 2005.
Frank Lampard was educated at Brentwood School, an independent school in Essex, where he was a classmate of television personality Jodie Marsh. He gained an A in his Latin GCSE, one of the 12 GSCEs he took. He reportedly has an IQ higher than 150, putting him in the most intelligent 0.1 per cent of the population.
International career :Lampard was first spotted by England under-21 manager Peter Taylor, and his under-21 debut came on 13 November 1997 in a match against Greece. He played for the under-21 side from November 1997 to June 2000, and scored nine goals, a mark bettered only by Alan Shearer and Francis Jeffers.
Lampard earned his first cap for England on 10 October 1999 in a 2–1 friendly win over Belgium, and scored his first goal on 20 August 2003 in a 3–1 win over Croatia. He was bypassed for Euro 2000 and the 2002 World Cup finals, and had to wait until Euro 2004 to participate in his first international competition. England reached the quarter-finals with Lampard netting three goals in four matches, he qualised for England in the 112th minute against Portugal bringing the scoreline to 2-2 but England lost on penalties. He was named in the team of the tournament by UEFA. He became a regular in the squad following the retirement of Paul Scholes, and was voted England Player of the Year by fans in 2004 and 2005.
Though Lampard played every minute of England's 2006 World Cup matches, he went scoreless as England were eliminated in the quarterfinals by Portugal on penalties. He scored in a 2-1 loss to Germany in a friendly. He was booed by England supporters while coming on as a second-half substitute during England's Euro 2008 qualifying match against Estonia on 13 October 2007, and finished with one goal (a 3–2 loss to Croatia on 21 November) as England failed to qualify for the tournament. He scored his first international goal in two years in a 4-0 win over Slovakia in March 2009, and also created another for Wayne Rooney. Lampard's goal was the 500th England goal scored at Wembley. On 9 September 2009, Lampard struck twice in England's 5-1 win against Croatia which secured their place for World Cup 2010.
Personal life:In 2000, Lampard, Ferdinand and Kieron Dyer appeared on a sex video that was filmed at the holiday resort of Ayia Napa on Cyprus. Channel 4 aired a brief clip as part of their 2004 documentary Sex, Footballers and Videotape, claiming it was used to "remind the viewer that this is based on real life." Lampard lives in Surrey and has two children with his former fiancée Elen Rives, Luna (born 22 August 2005) and Isla; the latter was born on 20 May 2007, just hours after Chelsea won the 2007 FA Cup. His autobiography, Totally Frank, was published in August 2006. In mid-February 2009 it was reported that Lampard and Rives had split, with Rives taking between £1m to £12.5m in settlement fees from Lampard's estimated £32m net worth.
A year after the death of his mother, on April 25, 2009, Lampard was involved in a radio confrontation with James O'Brien on the London radio station LBC 97.3. Newspapers had reported that following Lampard's split from Rives their children were living with her in a small flat while Lampard had converted their family home into a bachelor pad. Lampard phoned-in, objecting to the assertion that he was "weak" and "scum" for allowing his children to live in inferior conditions to him, and that he had fought "tooth and nail" to keep his family together.
He is a supporter of the Conservative Party, but admitted that he had yet to vote in an election. British media reported that Lampard showed an unusually high IQ score during neurological research carried about by the Chelsea Club doctor, Bryan English. English stated that "Frank Lampard scored one of the highest set of marks ever recorded by the company doing the tests". He was selected by EA Sports to be one of the two football stars to be on the cover of FIFA 10 football game pack globally, along with Theo Walcott and Wayne Rooney.
