For modern day Chelsea fans, the only owners worthy of discussion are Roman Abramovich and the Clearlake-Todd Boehly consortium that bought the club from him. Those of a certain vintage will remember one of the most important characters in the club’s not too distant past, however, in the form of Ken Bates. It was Bates that bought the club from the Mears family when it looked to be heading towards ruin and financial destruction, managing to turn Chelsea’s fortunes around. The question is, what do we know about him and how much did he pay for the Blues?
The Early Life of Ken Bates
Kenneth William Bates was born in Ealing on the fourth of December 1931. He was effectively raised by his grandparents after his mother died not long after his death and his father absconded, meaning that he grew up in their council flat. When he was younger he was a Queens Park Rangers supporter and made some attempts to become a professional football that ultimately failed. As he realised he would not be able to live his dream of playing football for a living, he moved into the world of the haulage industry.
After making a fortune operating a haulage firm, Bates began to move into the quarrying industry before also turning his hand to ready-made concrete and then dairy farming. In the 1960s and 1970s, Bates also tried to get involved in things in both the British Virgin Islands and what was then known as Rhodesia. In 1967, for example, he did a tour with the Rhodesian MP Ian Smith at a time when the country was under sanctions from the United Nations. He also made moves to take control of one of the British Virgin Islands.
Bates reportedly attempted to gain control of most of Anegada, close to Tortola, taking a 199-year lease. His plan had been to dredge the Roadtown Harbour of Tortola as well as to create and then develop land around the Wickams Cay area. The agreement was known as the Bates-Hill Agreement, but strong opposition from islanders who were strongly against his involvement led to the local government changing its mind and the British government investigating. Nowadays, there is a park on Tortola named in honour of Noel Lloyd, who led the protests against Bates.
Oldham Athletic & Wigan Athletic
In the 1960s, Ken Bates decided to use some of his fortune to purchase Oldham Athletic and became the club’s Chairman. The Northern side had been struggling for some time before Bates’ arrival, but their fortunes began to change under his Chairmanship and the management of Jack Rowley. In the 1962-1963 season, for example, the club gained promotion to the Third Division, but over the six seasons that followed they struggled for consistency, both in the league and when it came to who was managing the club.
Having seen numerous changes in the dugout, the 1968-1969 campaign saw Jack Rowley return, but neither he nor Bates could save the club from its seemingly inevitable relegation. Halfway through the following season, the two men left Oldham Athletic permanently. Bates, though, had got a taste for being involved with a football club and in 1980 he became the co-owner and Vice Chairman of Wigan Athletic. He made the purchase with an old business partner called Freddie Pye, offering significant finance through bank guarantees.
The fact that Bates was involved meant that the club could look towards the transfer market in order to back the manager at the time, Larry Lloyd, with new signings. Names such as Eamonn O’Keefe, the then-Everton player, were brought in for £65,000. The result of Bates’ co-ownership and financial investment was that Wigan Athletic gained promotion to the Third Division in the May of 1982. It was during this time that Bates had an eye on what was happening at Chelsea, so decided to divest his interest in Wigan in favour of a move to buy the then-beleaguered London club.
Bates Buys the Blues
In order to understand how Ken Bates found himself in a position to buy Chelsea Football Club, you first need to understand a little about where the club was at the time. Having been owned by the same family that helped to set it up in 1905, Chelsea believed that the good times were just around the corner and that long-term success was part of the plan when the Blues won their first First division title at the end of the 1954-1955 season. They were dissuaded from taking part in the newly created European Champions’ Cup by the Football League, however.
Ted Drake, the man who had led Chelsea’s title success, was sacked in 1961 and Tommy-Docherty was given the role of player-manager. He built a new team that could compete for honours, coming close to winning a treble in the 1964-1965 campaign before ending up with just the League Cup. They did win the FA Cup in 1970 and the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup 12 months later, defeating Real Madrid in Athens, but it ended up being something of a false dawn for a side that was about to come close to financial ruin.
| Season | League | Final Position |
|---|---|---|
| 1971/72 | Division 1 | 7th |
| 1972/73 | Division 1 | 12th |
| 1973/74 | Division 1 | 17th |
| 1974/75 | Division 1 | 21st (Relegated) |
| 1975/76 | Division 2 | 11th |
| 1976/77 | Division 2 | 2nd (Promoted) |
| 1977/78 | Division 1 | 16th |
| 1978/79 | Division 1 | 22nd (Relegated) |
| 1979/80 | Division 2 | 4th |
| 1980/81 | Division 2 | 12th |
| 1981/82 | Division 2 | 12th |
| 1982/83 | Division 2 | 18th |
In the wake of the Cup Winners’ Cup success, the squad discipline began to decline and the team spirit fell away along with it. Results also weren’t what they could have hoped for, with the Blues being relegated at the end of the 1974-1975 season. When it looked like Chelsea were going to be one of the dominant forces in English football, a decision was taken to try to turn Stamford Bridge into a 60,000-seat coliseum of football. Sadly, the rebuild plans came along at the same time as an economic crisis on the world stage sent the costs spiralling.
By 1977, Chelsea were in £4 million worth of debt. They were unable to sign any players whatsoever between 1974 and 1978, resulting in declining attendances, whilst many of those who were in attendance made up a large part of Chelsea’s hooligan contingent. Having been promoted back to the First Division in 1977, they were then relegated at the end of the 1978-1979 season and were on the brink of being relegated out of the Second Division at the start of the 1980s. Brian Mears, the Chairman, had sold shares of Stamford Bridge to a property development company.
It was at this stage that Mears, having resigned as Chairman, agreed to sell Chelsea to Ken Bates. Bates, ever the enterprising businessman, agreed to pay just £1 for Chelsea Football & Athletic Company, taking on its debts as well. The Blues narrowly escaped relegation at the end of the 1982-1983 campaign, with Bates deciding to make fund available for the club to be able to sign some talented players who would hopefully be able to help turn its fortunes around, with the likes of Kerry Dixon, Pat Nevin, David Speedie and Nigel Spackman all arriving at Stamford Bridge.
Turning Things Around at Stamford Bridge
the first few years of Bates’ ownership were largely about trying to get things back on track for the club. The players that he signed for manager John Neal helped the club gain promotion back to the First Division, soon re-establishing themselves as a top-flight side with back-to-back top six finishes. Off the pitch, Bates took on a legal battle with Marler Estates, the company that had bought a large portion of Stamford Bridge’s freehold. He managed to re-unite Chelsea with the Stamford Bridge freehold, ensuring the club’s home for the long-term.
Part of the plan to ensure Chelsea and Stamford Bridge would remain together in the long-term came in the form of the establishment of the Chelsea Pitch Owners organisation, which was responsible for staving off any future interest from developers as well as making the club as financially viable as possible. In the mid-1980s, with the Blues attempted to deal with their hooligan element, Bates arranged for an electric fence to be put up around the pitch, only to have to dismantle it when the local council wouldn’t allow him to turn the electricity on.
Bates & Partick Thistle
In the June of 1986, Bates decided to spend around £100,000 in order to buy a controlling stake of the Scottish side Partick Thistle. The club’s Chairman, Miller Reid, was an acquaintance of Bates and had let him known about the perilous financial position in which it found itself, allowing him to take advantage. He soon appointed Derek Johnstone, a former Chelsea player, as the manager, intending to use the Scottish side as a feeder club for his English team, with players such as John McNaught, Colin West and Billy Dodds having links to both.
His time in Scotland didn’t last long. The fact that he seemed to be more interested in using Partick Thistle in order to strengthen his Chelsea team certainly go down well with the Jags’ supporter base. In the April of 1989, a group of local businessmen that included Jim McDonald, the new Partick Thistle Chairman, got together in order to buy Bates’ remaining shares of the club, seeing him leave Glasgow and return to concentrating his efforts on making Chelsea into the best version of itself; albeit the period showed his continued desire to have a hand in football wherever possible.
A Controversial Figure
It is fair to say that Ken Bates was a controversial figure throughout his time at Stamford Bridge and even in the years after he left. During the 1990s, with Bates funding the redevelopment of the football ground into an all-seater affair after the Taylor Report into the Hillsborough Disaster demanded it of top-flight sides, he entered a long-running dispute with Mathew Harding. Harding had been a club benefactor and the Vice-Chairman, but the pair disagreed over the direction that Chelsea was heading in, with the disagreement only coming to a close after Harding’s death.
The former Vice-Chairman died in a helicopter crash in the October of 1996, with Bates later saying;
“I don’t believe evil should triumph and he was an evil man.”
This is a much happier ship at Chelsea now he’s no longer around”.
It was not the only time that Bates had proven to be a divisive figure. He would regularly use his programme notes on a match day to attack numerous individuals, often in controversial fashion. In 2002, for example, he was sued for libel when he described one of the Chelsea supporter groups as ‘parasites’.
Alongside his time as Chelsea owner, Bates also worked with the Football Association Executive and was involved in the project to rebuilt Wembley Stadium. He was given the role of Chairman of Wembley National Stadium in 1997 but when he felt as though he wasn’t getting enough support four years later he tendered his resignation. When speaking about what could be done to ensure the Wembley regeneration went ahead as planned, Bates suggested that the only hope of moving things forward was to shoot Kate Hoey, then-Minister for Sport.
Leaving Chelsea
In all, Ken Bates spent 21 years at Chelsea, seeing the club become an established top-flight side and Stamford Bridge be entirely modernised and refurbished. He had become Chelsea’s most successful Chairman, winning the League Cup in 1998, the Full Members’ Cup twice, plus the UEFA Cup Winners’ Cup and the UEFA Super Cup the same year. They also won the FA Cup in both 1997 and 2000, regularly finishing in the top six and pushing Manchester United close for the Premier League title in 1999, only missing out by four points.
He was someone who was happy to wield the axe on the manager if he felt as though the club wasn’t achieving what he wanted it to achieve, spending large sums of money putting together a decent playing squad. Names like Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Gianfranco Zola and Marcel Desailly were all brought to Stamford Bridge under Bates’ watch. The problem was that he was never quite doing things on the up and up, putting a debt of around £80 million onto the club in order to sign players and securing it against Stamford Bridge in order to do so.
Life After the Blues
Having been involved in football in one form or another throughout his adult life, it is hardly all that surprising that Ken Bates decided to remain a football man even after he had sold his interest in Chelsea. In the January of 2005, having already failed in an attempt to invest his money in Sheffield Wednesday, Bates bought 50% of the Championship side Leeds United, becoming the Principal Owner and Chairman as a result. He did it, he said at the time, because he wanted ‘one last challenge’ before he walked away from football for good, believing that Leeds would present that challenge.
Almost immediately he courted controversy, having a dispute with his former club over the ‘tapping-up’ of some Leeds youngsters, which Chelsea denied. Chelsea, in reply, decided to report him to the Football Association for saying that the new Directors of the London club were a ‘bunch of shysters from Siberia’, which Bates then denied. Meanwhile, Leeds were accused of improperly signing some young players from the non-league side Farsley Celtic. Bates was busy making regaining ownership of Elland Road and the training ground at Thorp Arch his main priorities whilst in charge of Leeds United.
In the May of 2007, two years into his ownership, Leeds went into administration thanks to unpaid debts of around £35 million. They were relegated down to the third tier of the English game, with the administrators, KPMG, announcing that the club would be sold to Leeds United Football Club Limited, a new company that saw Bates in place as one of three Directors. The club was bought for £1.5 million, but Bates remained unpopular with supporters who demanded his resignation during protests that took place at the ground before, during and after Leeds’ matches.
His ownership of Leeds followed a similar pattern to that that had been in place at Chelsea, sacking managers whenever he felt as though they didn’t perform to his expectations. The likes of Dennis Wise, Gary McAllister and Neil Warnock were all managers under Bates’ time at the club. Towards the end of November 2012, Bates agreed to sell Leeds United to a Middle-East based private equity group called GFH Capital in a cash deal worth £52 million. He stayed on as Chairman, eventually stepping down at the start of July 2013 to become Honorary President before being sacked six months later.