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Watch out Ken’s back!

20 years on from selling Chelsea to Abramovich, a Monaco audience with Ken Bates

From ROBERT DINEEN

IT IS not a straightforward task to persuade Ken Bates to agree to an interview. Speaking from his Monaco apartment, he begins by asking my age, job and where I live, although he does not reveal what is required to get to the next stage of the assessment. His wife, Suzannah, then picks up his mobile phone and requests further detail on the motivation for the article. Finally, after a few days, with the couple having come round to the idea, Bates insists on more than the suggested coffee. ‘You can buy me f***ing lunch,’ he says.

He asks to meet in the bar of his favourite Monte Carlo hotel. It provides stunning views of the Mediterranean from its ceiling-to-floor windows and, on this weekday afternoon, more staff than clientele. Suzannah, a polite, charming woman, turns up as well, presumably for moral support, but her role also appears to keep Bates in check. This is not an easy job.

In a conversation that lasts almost two hours, one of the most distinctive characters in recent English football not only covers the most memorable events from his career as a club owner, but he maligns everything from the Government’s ‘pointless’ proposed regulator of the sport, to modern coaches’ obsession with ‘f***ing boring’ possession football and the increased foreign ownership of British clubs. He also insults some wellknown individuals, including Glenn Hoddle, Neil Warnock and, on one revealing tangent, Piers Morgan. Aged 91, Bates, does not stop for a drink, let alone food.

In short, he is the ideal interviewee.

ON the subject of overseas ownership, no investor is spared his censure, including the type of American wealth fund which bought his beloved Chelsea. ‘The Arabs. Qataris, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Bahrain... clubs are either a rich man’s plaything or what’s even worse, we’ve [tried to] follow the American style where they’ve got five or six national games, each with 10, 12 clubs, no relegation, and they’re all owned by wealth management companies,’ he says. ‘It’s just an investment to them. You don’t win things any more, you buy them and I think it’s disgraceful. It’s not the game.’

How is that different to his model? Having bought Chelsea for £1 in 1982, when they were struggling in the old Second Division, Bates turned them into an elite Premier League club through serious investment in the coaching and playing staff. ‘I didn’t invest in clubs. I got involved in them — and that was because I loved the game.’

Brought up on a council estate in Hanwell, west London, Bates made his first fortune in the ready-mix concrete business. This helped him to purchase Oldham Athletic in 1965, where he remained for five years. He also had a spell in charge of Wigan Athletic before buying Chelsea. At the time, the club were broke, Stamford Bridge was dilapidated and relegation to the third tier was a serious threat, with the side avoiding it only on the final day of the 1982-83 season.

A year later, with the late John Neal as manager and a squad that included Kerry Dixon and Pat Nevin, they won promotion. It started a new era. Over the next 19 seasons, they spent one campaign outside the top flight, won the FA Cup twice, the European Cup Winners’ Cup and League Cup. In Bates’s final seven seasons, they never finished below the top six and were fourth before he sold the club to Roman Abramovich in 2003, reportedly for a £17million profit.

It was suggested that the club’s financial plight meant he sold up in desperation. Bates is quick to reject the criticism. Having upgraded Stamford Bridge on prime real estate, he insists that the increased value of it insured him against problems with the bank. ‘Contrary to misstatements we weren’t in financial difficulties,’ he says. ‘We owed £110million, of which £75million was a 10-year interest-only mortgage. We were a property company and property companies have mortgages. But the d**kheads who I’d made enemies of over the seasons said I was struggling. Load of rubbish.’

The pivotal meeting with Abramovich, then scarcely known outside his native Russia, was straightforward. ‘I met him and all his sidekicks in the Dorchester [hotel] at six o’clock. He didn’t speak English very well. He said we’re prepared to pay this. I knew it was a higher offer than the market price. I accepted. I didn’t need advisors. I did my deal. All done just over an hour. Then I walked up to St James’ Street to Harry’s Bar, where we were going to have dinner. That’s how you do business. Behind closed doors.’

He compares it to the protracted and public sale of Manchester United. ‘When I sold up, nobody knew a f***ing thing about it. It was, “Oh, Bates has sold to a Russian.” But now Jim whatisname [Ratcliffe] is coming into it. Qataris are coming into it. Saudi Arabia wants to buy it. So it goes on. It’s all through the f***ing newspapers.’

Bates says Claudio Ranieri was his favourite manager at Chelsea and Gianfranco Zola his best signing. He fondly recalls the efforts of players from the Eighties such as David Speedie and Clive Walker. Age has not softened his view of Matthew Harding, Bates’s former vice-chairman at Chelsea, who died in a helicopter crash in 1996. He was a ‘conman’.

Hoddle, the club’s manager for two years until 1995, was ‘f***ing useless’. Peter Ridsdale, the former Leeds owner, ‘f***ed up the club’ before Bates bought them in 2005. Bates’s verdict on Warnock, a former Leeds manager, must be omitted for legal reasons. Sorry.

While dining with Bates and Suzannah, his third wife, Morgan made the mistake of repeatedly insisting that the public had a right to know more about his personal life. ‘In the end, we just got up and walked out,’ says Bates. ‘It goes to show Piers Morgan has always been an a ****** e.’

SUITABLY warned, I bring up the subject of Bates’s childhood with some caution. It has been said that his mother died when he was about 18 months old and that his father abandoned him at the same time, leaving his grandparents to raise him. Born with a clubbed foot, he had eight operations on it as a child, though it did not stop him playing football as often as he could. It has also been reported that Bates thought his grandparents were his parents until the age of 16. He was 20 when he first met his dad, a lorry driver. ‘It was a very unusual upbringing,’ says Suzannah.

This is not a welcome topic of conversation, it would seem. What was his father like? ‘I don’t know.’ Could he describe his grandparents? ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’ Would he at least suggest what the young Bates would have made of him now, having achieved all that he has done? ‘I’m not giving

Ken on Roman Abramovich... When I sold up, no one knew a f***ing thing about it. Now it’s all done in the newspapers

you that quote.’ All will apparently be revealed in the autobiography that Suzannah, a former sports journalist, is ghost-writing. ‘I’m not going to let you spoil it,’ he says. ‘Pay £21.99 on Amazon, the same as everyone else. You’ll love it.’ He lets out a throaty laugh.

To judge by the interview, Bates’s written account of the myriad disputes in his business life will rule in his favour. In the late Sixties, he sought to reclaim 86 acres of land on the British Virgin Islands and redevelop it as he saw fit. The British Government initially supported the plan only to change their position once it prompted strong local unrest. The project was quashed. ‘The civil service killed me on that one,’ says Bates.

Already then a father to five children, he moved next to Dublin, setting up the Irish Trust Bank. When it went bankrupt, prompting the Irish Government to repay its hundreds of small savers, an investigation unsuccessfully tried to prove that the bank loaned its owner money via offshore entities. ‘I sued the Central Bank of Ireland. Went to the Supreme Court. Had them found guilty of perjury and attempting to pervert the cause of justice.’ An official document confirms Bates successfully blocked the Central Bank of Ireland’s attempt to force his resignation.

In 2007, two years into his ownership of Leeds, Bates placed the club in administration with debts of £35m. It then passed into the hands of two offshore trusts, whom Bates said tasked him with running the club. Bates, having denied that he knew the identity of the individuals behind the investment vehicles, went on to buy them out. When a Parliamentary report criticised the opacity around the club’s ownership, Bates accused its authors of working to a ‘hidden agenda’. I wonder what he makes of the recent Government White Paper, which was drawn up in response to Tracey Crouch’s fan-led review of football governance. The report promised an independent regulator to protect clubs from problematic ownership. ‘It’s a load of bloody rubbish,’ he says. ‘It [the regulator] will be composed of people who know eff-all about football. It’s the civil servants who are destroying the country anyway.

‘[Let’s] talk about all the other regulators we’ve got. What f***ing good do they do? Child abuse. Police regulator. What do any of these socalled regulators do? They ponce about. Have resolutions and “resolve”. You watch them every day on the bloody TV. “We’re going to tackle this with the utmost severity until we get a satisfactory solution...” What does that mean?’

What about clubs who have gone bust recently, for example, Bury and Derby County? Should the owners of such teams not be reined in? ‘Why? It’s their fault. Football is a business like any other. You don’t pay your electricity bill, you get cut off.’ What does he make of Crouch’s suggestion that fans receive a golden share in their club, giving them some influence in the running of it? ‘Great, tell them to put their money where their mouth is. What’s he [the fan] going to do? Oppose every price increase? Lobby for his favourite player to be picked? What goes on behind the scenes has got to be confidential.’

I would pay money to learn all that Bates, a former Football Association director, said within the game’s corridors of power. In one anecdote missing from popular accounts of the Premier League’s formation, he claims to have held private talks with Rupert Murdoch in which they settled on the price of Sky’s first TV deal before the clubs voted on it. He chaired the FA committee that was set up to manage the Wembley Stadium rebuild, only to be removed from the post in 2000, having upset the stakeholders. ‘Christ only had one Pontius Pilate — I had a whole team of them,’ he said at the time.

Twice when I call him, Bates answers his mobile with the word Brexit. It is, I think, a lighthearted but sincere endorsement of the seismic vote. He has lived in Monaco since the Chelsea sale. Asked how often he returns to Britain, he says, while smiling, ‘for the maximum allowed under the tax laws’. Instead, he watches English football on TV and finds that he misses the less sophisticated game. He wishes teams would attempt fewer short passes and get the ball ‘up the f***ing pitch’ to excite the fans. He cannot bear the sight of players feigning injury and views it as a modern curse.

He also laments the apparently lost connection between clubs and their communities. This is partly the result, he thinks, of attracting those absent owners from abroad who are supposedly interested only in the bottom line.

Surely Bates, the incorrigible entrepreneur, would agree that the diversity of Premier League boardrooms is inevitable in the global market? ‘No, we could have done something about it,’ he says, with evident frustration. ‘I spent some time lobbying for it: the FA should have ruled that all clubs have got to be 51 per cent owned by Brits.’

Beneath all his entertaining opprobrium, Bates would seem quite the softie. He pays Suzannah compliments and, on several occasions, checks on her well-being. When his daughter calls him, his tone shifts to one of respectful concern. He insists on paying for my coffee, too, albeit before telling our cab driver that his payment is on the Mail. En route to Bates’s apartment, Suzannah whispers out of his earshot: ‘You know, you were lucky today. You got the real Ken.’

What does she mean? ‘He’s actually very shy,’ she says. You could have fooled me.

Suzannah on Ken... You know, you were lucky today. He’s actually very shy

Ken on fans getting a share of their clubs... Great, tell them to put their money where their mouth is

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2023-03-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

2023-03-26T07:00:00.0000000Z

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