Unsurprisingly, given its author, the plot of Frank Lampard's first children's book, Frankie's Magic Football, turns on goals. Chips, flicks, tackles, but mostly goals. "Frankie didn't like to give up. He closed his eyes and told himself to relax." Frankie? Lampard laughs, slightly embarrassed. "I didn't know where else to go – I knew I was going to get asked that by everyone. I mean, I like the name Frankie. If I ever have a son I would call him Frankie, and it's a family name – it's my dad and my dad's dad, so you know, it sticks. I won't forget it." He laughs again.
When we talked a few weeks ago, at a small five-star hotel near where he lives in west London, he was just back from Chelsea FC's training ground in Cobham and his own footballing future was uncertain – would the club let his contract run out in the next couple of weeks? Would he follow in David Beckham's footsteps and take an honourable (and extremely lucrative) pre-retirement gig at LA Galaxy? Since then he has broken the record for the most goals scored by a Chelsea player, signed a year-long contract with the club and captained his side to victory in the Europa League. On Sunday he will lead out the England team in Brazil. But even then, while there was all sorts of brinksmanship going on behind the scenes, and he was – still is, though with somewhat less urgency – facing the beginning of the end of his career, he had a certain ease about him: the air of someone who has been so successful and so well known for so long that his confidence is unshakable. It is, obviously, in an interviewee's interest to be gentlemanly and personable, but with Lampard it doesn't feel put on; the result is a kind of openness and straightforwardness.
Take, for instance, his answer to why and how he joined the footballer-writer ranks of Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Camus, Arthur Conan Doyle – and, erm, David Beckham and Theo Walcott. "I just came up with the idea of the characters for the stories, and I didn't really have the balls to do it as such. I sat on the idea for ages and then I spoke to Steve" – his manager, Steve Kutner, who sits in on the interview waiting to pounce on anyone threatening to stray offside – "and said I wanted to try and do something about it." How did he find the writing? "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." So did you actually write any words? "Yeah, bits of it."
"I would love to get to the stage," he says later, "where I can actually write the whole book myself."
His first outing is pretty competent, if full of extremely familiar tropes: a battered old football that turns out to have magical properties, an odd person at a fair, a gateway to a different world, a desert island, a pirate ship. And he is obviously very concerned to give real tips. So there are little lessons about fair play, about bravery, about not littering – but also, most interestingly, about focus: about staying calm in the moment, shutting out distraction and achieving the self-posession required to score a goal (or achieve anything, really) under pressure. The last is, of course, what makes the difference between people who are talented and people who actually win. How does he do it, standing on the pitch, waiting to take a penalty in front of millions of people? "It's a kind of zoning out, I think. The trick is a mental trick really and I'm quite good like that. I think I was a bit better when I was younger, because now I'm older I'm more aware of the consequences of failure, if you know what I mean." His autobiography, Totally Frank, begins with a graphic example of what kind of failure he means: his penalty miss in the 2006 World Cup.
But there's also "an element that you can work on, and that's for me by practising and practising and doing it again, and doing it in different circumstances, because it's very easy to score a penalty over at the park with your mates, whereas it's very difficult when the cameras of the world are on you". This latter element is what seems always to come up in discussions of Frank Lampard: a willingness to practise harder, for longer, than anyone else.
Lampard is from a footballing dynasty. His father (Frank, of course) played for West Ham and was assistant manager there; his uncle is Harry Redknapp, now manager of Queens Park Rangers; Redknapp's son, Jamie, captained Liverpool and Spurs before retiring. Although Lampard is now willing to admit that this probably opened some doors, it also meant a reverse form of special treatment: boos and jeers and constant accusations of nepotism when he was signed at his first club, West Ham, and, from his father, the requirement to be better than everyone else by dint of simple graft. "My dad was very hard, and he'd take me for extra training when I didn't want to go, when I wanted to hang out with my mates. He gave me a real work ethic, but at the time I used to get pretty pissed off with it because I didn't want to be pushed so much at that age." What kind of pushing, exactly? "He wouldn't tell me off for missing a penalty – he'd more tell me off for not bothering to run back or not being focused or concentrated. I mean, I've got a nephew who's seven, Stanley, and he plays now, and my dad has moved all his frustrations on to him." The only time Lampard has admitted getting into trouble at school – Brentwood, a public school – was when he skived off to play in a youth cup game for West Ham. "But my dad was in on it … I got two hours' Saturday detention." He got 10 GCSEs there, enough to give him a reputation as an unusually bright footballer – a reputation later burnished when IQ tests of Chelsea players found that Lampard clocked in at 150, "one of the highest set of marks ever recorded by the company doing the tests". His overriding strength, on the field, is in reading the game: being in the right place at the right time to score, over and over again.
He calls himself a mummy's boy; talks of how he would sit in the bath crying when his father had been particularly hard on him with his yelling from the sidelines, "and her sort of knocking on the door saying, 'Can I come in,' and then giving me a few words". Did she try to stop his father? "Yeah, she would have done, but as I've got older I've realised she would have done that out of sight of me. There was never the two of them fighting with each other about my game. I think she also understood that it was kind of good for me in a certain way, so there was balance to it." His mother died suddenly a few years ago, when she was 58. Frankie's Magic Football is dedicated to her, as was his record-breaking goal; unbelievably – or perhaps not, given the depths some football fans have been known to sink to – he went out on to the field after her death and was met with taunts: "You've got no family."
Which is also untrue, of course: there's his dad; those uncles and cousins; an ex-partner, Elen Rivas, and their two daughters (for whom he first started making up stories, though they're "not actually football-mad, so it was time machines and fairies and Barbies and angels and stuff – you know, all that rubbish"); his fiancee, the broadcaster Christine Bleakley. There's also the camaraderie-rich family of the locker room, which has been a constant all his life. What does that do to his view of the world, insofar as he can tell? "There's a lot of testosterone in the dressing room. There's a lot of alpha male [behaviour]. You do see the law of the jungle develop at certain times, when the big characters come out and there's the quieter lads and the ones in between and cliques." Lampard himself can, by all accounts, be both alpha and cliquey: longevity and seniority, as well as his goalscoring value to the club, give him, along with his friends John Terry and Ashley Cole, a certain power at Chelsea. The departure in 2012 of manager André Villas-Boas, for instance, is partly ascribed to Lampard and co's refusal to support him. Certainly the midfielder is in no doubt about which manager he would like to work with again – and, in an interestingly coincidental alignment of the planets, it is expected that José Mourinho, under whom Lampard won two league titles, will announce his return to Chelsea after his final game with Real Madrid today.
Lampard refuses – nicely, unlike his manager, who snarls, "this is not about Chelsea" – to answer questions about a couple of incidents in the past few years that suggest the law of the jungle might be getting out of hand: Ashley Cole "larking about" with a .22 calibre air rifle on Chelsea's training ground and shooting a boy on work experience; the alleged racist comments that earned John Terry a four-match ban – "I definitely don't want to get into that one because that's a teammate and a court case is happening and everything". Lampard is clear about the unrealistic expectations placed on very young men, suddenly famous, suddenly rich, to be role models. "I'm quite staunch on that one," he says. "I think footballers get a bad name for a lot of wrong reasons." He has a couple of unsavoury incidents in his own past – a sex tape involving him, Rio Ferdinand and Kieron Dyer, for instance, filmed in Ayia Napa; and another incident when he and a few others, including Terry, were thrown out of a Heathrow hotel for drunkenness, stripping and vomiting in front of grieving Americans the day after 9/11 – but they are now a long time ago. "I made mistakes along the way and I think a lot of kids do too, who go to work in a bank, and it obviously doesn't get put in a newspaper." Of Liverpool's Luis Suárez biting Branislav Ivanovic – Lampard was on the pitch at the time, though he didn't realise what had happened until he got back to the dressing room – he says: "I couldn't believe it, but I'm a bit torn on this one. I get the instinct on the pitch and I've lost my temper for whatever reason. I've never bitten anyone; I don't think I'm too confrontational that way. Other people live maybe more on the edge. Of course biting's wrong – that's why he got banned for 10 games – but I'm certainly not one to say 'string him up and throw him out the country'. You have to be on your guard, but you can't expect human beings to be perfect in a sporty environment where people are pushing each other to try and win. I think we kind of love it, if we're all honest as football-lovers: you kind of love the scandal of certain things happening."
Lampard, although he voted for Tony Blair, is a conservative at heart, and once said the last thing he'd read would be the Guardian. Another laugh. "Things change. I have read the Guardian, at the dentist's." He thinks Cameron is doing a good job, but understands why people are worried about immigration and voting for Ukip, though he would not do so himself.
And he is beginning to realise that, although he is still in the very top flight of players, he can't always do what he used to be able to do. A bad injury about three years ago was a salutary lesson that he could no longer maintain the type of extra training he was used to – the sprints and stamina work. He goes to the gym more than he once did, listens to the physios more, has the occasional small shock when his body will not do exactly what he tells it, but "then there are other moments where you feel that you're better because of your experience, so I think they can balance each other. I think that's why certain players such as Ryan Giggs and Paolo Maldini in Italy go on to like 40 years of age at the top level, because they're smart enough on the pitch to counteract the little things that start to go."
Is he prepared for when it all has to stop? The playing, of course, but also that other thing, almost unimaginable for most people: the adulation of millions? "I will certainly miss going out on a Saturday afternoon or whenever it is you play and scoring a goal or playing in a winning performance in front of 40,000 fans. I'll always be a Chelsea fan and I'll always go and watch, but it'll never be the same as playing, so that's something I have to get my head around. I'll try and put it off for as long as I can, but I think I'll be ready."
• Frankie's Magic Football: Frankie v the Pirate Pillagers is published by Atom on 6 June
