Frank Leboeuf is back at the Bridge for the first time since he played for a Chelsea Legends side against Inter Milan’s equivalent back in 2018, and he is here to analyse the Champions League match between the Blues and Lille, the current champions in his homeland.Prior to appearing on Matchday Live however, our former defender was in the museum at the stadium where he is loaning his prize possessions from his career. Leboeuf won the FA Cup twice, the League Cup, the European Cup Winners’ Cup and the UEFA Super Cup with Chelsea, and the World Cup with France, and shirts, medals and boots from those momentous occasions will be on display, plus the shirt he wore when scoring his beautiful last-gasp winner in a match against Leicester. The French word for goal is written on the label to mark that one out.

While he was handing over the historic items, we caught up with him ahead of the game, for which as his Play Prediction entry suggests, he is hopeful of a Chelsea win.‘Chelsea are definitely the favourites and if they work to 100 per cent, there's no way that Lille can cope with a team that won the Champions League and is now the champion of the World Club Cup,’ Leboeuf tells us, ‘but you have to work properly and professionally, like Paris St-Germain did against Lille lately and won 5-1 away from home.’He is speaking with the eye of a regular pundit for ESPN, work he mixes with the acting career he took up when his playing days finished. He also produces plays, and prefers to work on stage rather than in front of cameras.

‘I’m also trying to find more space to make time to be with my wife, my kids and now my grandkids,’ he explains. Leboeuf spends most of his time near the part of Paris where N’Golo Kante grew up.‘I’m a big fan of N’Golo,’ he says, ‘and my wife’s mother used to hire N’Golo’s mother. She had a nursery school and used to help my mother-in-law. I said to my wife that when watching today’s game, you have to follow only him for five minutes, just to see how he reads the game and how his instincts are absolutely fantastic, on top of him being so physically good.‘Technically he is much better than when he played for Caen. The guy's perfect and it is not too many times in France we have somebody very humble! But he is a very humble person who is an absolutely treasure for us!’

It could be said that with his great ball control and superb range of passing, especially over long distances, Leboeuf introduced the modern style to the Chelsea central defence in the late 1990s. We are therefore keen to know his view on one of his successors there, Thiago Silva.‘I'm a fan now. I have to say when I was watching him playing for Paris St-German, I thought he had a lack of leadership but he got that straightaway with Chelsea because he was surrounded by very talented but young players, so he had to take charge and make sure they're going to follow and be successful.‘Thiago is an absolutely talent, that's for sure, and you don't last that long without being a professional. I'm so pleased that he plays for my best team.

‘What I've been through with Chelsea is absolutely fantastic and I will never feel it again. Every time I go back to Stamford Bridge it makes me pleased but the same time it hurts me because it's the past and I'm getting older and some people don't even recognise me, but that's part of our lives and we have to accept that.‘Of course Chelsea is my club and I am sad when I have to criticise them when they are not playing well and I am working for ESPN. I have to say the truth but in my mind I want them to be successful and when they don't do well it breaks my heart. My blood is not red, it is blue.’What is for certain is that when the Champions League theme strikes up tonight, memories of Chelsea’s first campaign in the competition in 1999/00 will hit Leboeuf. After some momentous results along the way, he and his team-mates ran Barcelona close before exiting at the quarter-finals.‘It was fantastic and I think we had the chance to win the competition if we did not make a mistake late in normal time against Barcelona. We had the team for that, we finished third in the Premier League and we lost only three league games during that season.

‘I’m sad I never won the Champions League but I'm pleased Chelsea won it twice after that and become a fantastic club and one of the biggest in the world.’For more views from Frank Leboeuf and the regulars on Matchday Live, tune in from 7.15pm.