Leeds United sale would see Ken Bates lost to football after 30 years. He will not be forgotten any time soon
What is that strange noise heading across the West Yorkshire moors? Unlikely as it seems, it may well be the onrushing sound of silence. Ken Bates, football’s rentagob, the one-man refutation of the idea that sporting a bushy white beard makes you as cuddly as Santa Claus, is about to sell Leeds United. By Jim White
There are t’s still to be crossed, and i’s dotted, but Bates is on the brink of handing over the keys to Elland Road.
And the bad news is, despite once insisting that ex-chairmen are “nobodies”, the chances of the now 80-year-old curmudgeon surfacing elsewhere are slim.
After 30 years, it appears the plug is about to be pulled on one of football’s most effortlessly entertaining sideshows.
Just consider what Bates has brought to the game. There were, for instance, his innovative ideas. Corralling paying customers behind electric fences, that was one. Turning Wembley into a mini Vegas of hotels and casinos, that was another.
Then there was his rigorous efforts to maintain the highest standards of diplomatic language when dealing with others in the game.
Describing Matthew Harding as evil, just a year after the man whose money had kept Chelsea afloat was killed in a helicopter crash, that was nice.
Suggesting that the quickest way to speed up the rebuilding of Wembley was for Kate Hoey, the then Sports Minister, to be shot, that was pleasant.
As for describing Chelsea’s board as “a bunch of Siberian shysters”, well that was somewhat forgetful; he certainly was less critical of the provenance of their wealth when they were injecting £140 million into his current account a couple of years previously.
Maybe he was misquoted. Though if he was it was largely to spare readers the more colourful byways of his language. Bates has never been a man who shied away from a microphone.
Thrust one in his direction and you could guarantee a splurge of verbals that would embarrass Andrew 'you're a pleb' Mitchell.
He regarded club chairmanship as an unmissable opportunity to climb aboard a soapbox. During his 20 years at the helm at Stamford Bridge his notes in the Chelsea programme were a fortnightly masterclass of scattergun fury.
True, every so often he was obliged to reach financial settlement with those – such as the committee of the Independent Chelsea Supporters Association – whose reputations he so cheerfully excoriated.
But his column never failed to provide Bates with that most valuable of commodities: his name in the headlines.
Though it would be entirely misleading to suggest that he was someone motivated solely by fame. There was, for instance, the small matter of money.
He bought Chelsea for £1 in 1982. In just over two decades he had parlayed that into £140 million. Which, as returns on an investment go, makes the Lottery look leaden-footed.
Bates would be right to argue that he presided on a sea change at Chelsea, transforming the club from second-division financial basket cases into Champions League contenders, in the process turning the Bridge from a crumbling embarrassment into a spangly, sparkly shopping mall.
That he did so by injecting precious little of his own money into the enterprise is neither here nor there.
Neither would it be fair to suggest that – with the banks itching for foreclosure to recover the £80 million he had borrowed to finance his property development – he was the luckiest man alive when, in 2004, Roman Abramovich’s pin landed on the part of the map he happened to own.
But it was at Leeds that Bates’s real acumen was demonstrated. When he arrived as 50 per cent owner, after the reckless previous board had jeopardised the very existence of the club of Revie, Giles and Bremner, Leeds United fans worried that he was merely an asset stripper.
To which he robustly replied that at Leeds there weren’t any “flippin’ assets to strip”. Except he didn’t say flippin’. In but two years he had skilfully turned the club around, making what had been an institution that was hamstrung by borrowings debt-free at a stroke.
That he did so by putting them into administration – and thus depriving debtors of any hope of a return while condemning long-suffering supporters to a diet of third-tier football – was of little long-term consequence when he could subsequently pick up full ownership of the club for peanuts.
With characteristic refusal to worry about charges of hypocrisy, Bates – the man who regularly described foreign owners of football clubs as idiots – is now about to sell to a consortium from Dubai.
Still, never mind the fact they are foreign, the consortium has been widely described as “secretive”, the identity of those behind it wrapped in a fog of obfuscation.
Which is just the way Bates likes to do his business: well away from the public eye. Oh yes, football will miss Ken Bates all right.