Wherever Ken Bates went in football, controversy followed. And his various dealings have led to his name being questioned beyond the sports arena too. The former Chelsea and Leeds United chairman remains one of the most immediately recognisable figures in the game over the last 50 years, but his rise to power at both historic clubs is a story which owes much to luck and circumstance.
Having been brought up by his grandparents in London, the outspoken businessman started his career in quarrying and construction but, as the Daily Mail reported, he only bought his first Bentley after marrying the daughter of a rich Irish squire.
In 1965 Bates met an American businessman, Norman Fowler, who had bought two islands of the British Virgin Islands using money inherited following the death in suspicious circumstances of his boyfriend Peter Watson. According to Bareboats BVI, Fowler had been trying to backfill the two-and-a-half acres of waters between the islands as part of development plans, only for the sea to wash away any attempted early construction.
Realising Fowler’s folly, Bates bought Wickham’s Cay from the American for US$700,000 (£600,000) and purchased a further 60 acres of BVI land in Anegada from the government of the time. He was then able to somehow persuade the local administrator to allow him to develop leisure resorts on the land for an annual rent of just $30,000 (£25,000) a year on a 199-year lease. Not bad for some of the most sought-after real estate in the world which was set to land him a return of around $300 million (£250m).
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Bates’ plans were controversial, to say the least, especially when he insisted that the only locals who would be allowed to set foot in Wickham’s Cay or Anegada were those who worked for him. Patsy Lake, of the Positive Action Movement, explained: “What alarmed us most was that, having come to a black country, he said the only black people that would be allowed would be those who were maids. So it meant that we either all had to turn into maids or we wouldn’t be permitted in Wickham’s Cay.”
Noel Lloyd stepped in. A native of the BVI, he became a political activist with the sole purpose of saving the islands from the ‘colonialist’ development. Lloyd later explained: “He had a clause in the agreement stating that the company would have the right to cut off water and electricity from the village, because he knew what he had in mind and could see that there would be unrest, so that would be like a weapon to subdue us, by having control over water and electricity.”
Lloyd led the Positive Action Movement’s protests against Bates’ development and, given the amount of ill-feeling, leaders were eventually persuaded to make a U-turn on the agreement. However, it took a $5.8m (£4.9m) payment to see the back of Bates.
In 1982, Bates bought Chelsea for £1. There were some who immediately questioned his suitability as chairman given a number of failed deals in the UK and Ireland as well as the controversy caused in the BVI. He hardly helped garner support in the mid-1980s when he installed electric fences at Stamford Bridge in a bid to deal with hooliganism. Prevented from turning the current on by the local council, Bates eventually had the fencing removed.
Having failed to buy Stamford Bridge when purchasing the club, Bates ran the risk of leaving Chelsea homeless for much of his first decade in charge, and the Blues were served with an eviction notice in 1989. But Bates struck lucky when the ground’s owners were declared insolvent a couple of years later, and when the Royal Bank of Scotland took over the freehold, they granted the chairman a 20-year lease on the stadium.
Yet Bates was still not running the club well. By 1992, Chelsea were technically insolvent, having failed to pay a number of creditors. Through legal chicanery which involved passing assets and contracts between multiple business names, the club was saved but creditors were due to be left unpaid. Bates’ advisor, John Papi, would eventually land up in prison for cheating the Inland Revenue, while the chairman’s appeal for investors at Chelsea saw Matthew Harding’s arrival on the Blues’ board.
Harding pumped in over £26m, spending £7.5m on the construction of the new North Stand as well as putting funds towards the purchase of the stadium, but Bates soon fell out with the benefactor and banned Harding from the boardroom. Even after Harding’s death in a helicopter crash after a Chelsea game at Bolton Wanderers in 1996, Bates was publicly opposed to Harding. In 1997, he referred to the late vice-chairman as “an evil man”.
With Harding gone, Bates again ran Chelsea into money trouble despite also leading them to the Champions League for the first time in 1999, and by 2003 the club was in debt to the tune of around £80m. The arrival of a once-in-a-lifetime offer from Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich saw Bates pocket £17m as the club he bought for £1 was placed in new, equally controversial, hands.
Bates landed upon a new target in January 2005, snapping up Leeds United, a club who had recently been leaking money in the hands of free-spending chairman Peter Ridsdale.
“Ken Bates’ motives are to prove yet again that he will run a football club successfully. We managed to solve 80 per cent of the problems, Ken will solve the rest, no doubt, “ said outgoing chairman Gerald Krasner. “And when we’re back in the Premiership with some silverware I’ll be quietly smiling that we played a very small part in that.
“He put his money down immediately. He’s not done any due diligence, he’s not interested. He’s sat down, he’s talked to us man to man, I like the way he does business.”
But before long it was the same old story. Supposedly the UK representative of a company based in the tax haven of the Cayman Islands, Bates claimed he didn’t know the exact identity of the club’s owners, and every time the FA tried to ascertain who owned Leeds United there was another unconvincing explanation as to why there was no legal requirement to report such details.
Meanwhile Bates was angering fans left, right and centre. By the summer of 2007, the Whites were relegated to League One, and when the chairman tried to use the opportunity to place the club into voluntary administration without suffering a 10-point deduction the following season, the bodged attempt landed them a 15-point loss when the board failed to follow the correct audit trail.
While this was going on, creditors who had leant Leeds around £15m over an 18-month period, one registered in Nevis and the other in the British Virgin Islands, somehow agreed to waive their debts so long as Bates kept charge of the club, with the same apparent ownership group buying back the club debt-free for less than £2m. It was the kind of inexplicable, clandestine move which had become so common in the story of Ken Bates.
He eventually found new owners for Leeds in 2012, selling up to Dubai-based private equity firm GFH Capital for a fee of around £52m, and while the chairman stayed on for a short time as honorary president he was sacked from the position in 2013 over a deal he had struck with a private plane company allowing him to fly between Leeds and his home in Monaco. The agreement had cost Leeds United £500,000 in three years, but Bates described his sacking as “despicable”.
Now retired, Bates still occasionally makes public comment on the state of modern football, particularly where it pertains to the kind of international ownership he himself brought in at both Chelsea and Leeds. “They should never have allowed foreign owners to buy Premier League clubs,” he told the Daily Telegraph in 2021. But without them he would never have got the pay-offs he did at either of the giant clubs.
To some he remains a lovable, straight-talking former custodian of their club. To others, the name Ken Bates elicits shivers down the spine. The one thing everyone can agree on is that there’s never been anyone else like him.
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