Times Online - Newspaper Edition

The ego has landed
ROB HUGHES
He made millions from selling Chelsea, but life out of the limelight does not suit Ken Bates, as Leeds will soon discover.

The ego has returned. While others were sleeping at 2.27am on Friday, the lawyer for Ken Bates was tying up the £10m deal that gives the former Chelsea owner all the trouble and strife and limelight he craves as chairman of Leeds United.
With typical acerbic brevity, he answered the question of whether he plans to bring his old mate Dennis Wise in as team manager. “A load of b******s,” said Chairman Ken. He’s back: 73 years young, offensive, blunt, supposedly open yet working in the dark, and taking on the challenge that cows other men.
Rescue Leeds on a £10m outlay? It sounds as credible as buying a derelict Chelsea for £1 and selling your stake 21 years later to a Russian oil billionaire for £17m.
Reworking the Leeds insolvency — reclaiming the land, the stadium, the training ground and the lost status of a perilously overspent northern club? As impossible as dragging Chelsea through the prospect of extinction to the cusp of European domination.
What Bates has done this weekend is, first and foremost, to buy himself a life. He has enough Roman Abramovich roubles to sit out the remainder of his days in his Monaco apartment overlooking the harbour — but life in the tax haven is surreal boredom. Ken Bates would rather be looking creditors, bankers, tax collectors, players, fans, hangers-on and cut-throat opponents in the eye. And preparing his chairman’s notes in the club programme.
The son of an Ealing lorry driver and a would-be Arsenal apprentice centre-half who underwent an operation as a child to cure a club foot, Bates soon became self-driven in pursuit of three things: football, money and putting one over the next man, lord or pauper.
Love or loathe him — and many do a bit of both — you cannot ignore our Ken. Chelsea was “the love of his life” for 22 years, but now it is Leeds. Long, long ago, it was Oldham Athletic when, as a 34-year-old sinking his energy and extracting his first fortune in Lancashire quarrying, he parked his Rolls at Boundary Park and bought a controlling interest.
It was Harry Massey, a retired builder and long-term Oldham director, who coined the saying “Mr Bates believes in a committee of two — with one absent.”
Yet Bates could be the saviour for Leeds.
He understands football fanatics, and Elland Road is filled even in adversity with many thousands of them. From the King’s Road to the Yorkshire pits, a common thread is the idiocy of grown men chasing a leather ball, and the community wishing above all else to be top dog at that passion.
Bates, with his gruffness and his sometimes calculatingly offensive put-downs, is as Yorkshire blunt as ever he was a Londoner. He’s prepared to pay for a new allegiance because the Abramovich cartel not only bought him out, but spat him out with little more charm than his own denunciation of the Mears family who preceded him at Stamford Bridge. He declared them less welcome than lepers.
A rugged toughness, hiding a sometimes soft-centred vulnerability, a desire to be admired and liked, brings Bates back into football chairmanship. The facts and figures of all his dealings — like many such affairs in football — may forever be clouded.
The outgoing board claim they reduced the debts from £103m to under £25m in 10 months. Once that old board leave the scene, the people who will work for Bates are his former confidants from Chelsea, Yvonne Todd and the lawyer Mark Taylor — although publican Peter Lorimer, the old Leeds winger, stays aboard to keep a face the Leeds faithful know and trust.
Whoever else is involved in the Geneva company Forward Sports Fund that made the £10m offer, and how much of that is Bates’s capital, will remain, to use a familiar Bates saying, for him to know and others to try to find out.
But his background in football is better established than rival bidders, from Sainsbury to fans’ trusts to supposed Middle Eastern benefactors.
Bates, at least, has been there and very nearly done a Leeds of his own. Many people point out that Bates took Chelsea to the brink of the same consequence through ludicrous overstretching — chasing the dream — as Peter Ridsdale, that ruinous fan in the boardroom.
One big difference is that Ridsdale backed the purchasing demands of his manager David O’Leary and sold Leeds into near terminal decline. Bates backed an awful lot of spending, but summarily sacked managers who wanted too much too soon.
And when disaster stared him in the bank balance, Bates had the luck, the guile, or the know-how to find a man more wealthy (for now) than any other buyer into the football dream industry. That, Bates will tell you looking over his tinted spectacles, is what life at the sharp end is all about.
In the year that “his” Chelsea are ready to finally buy the championship that eluded him, Bates is reaching down to try to pick up by the bootlaces a fallen giant that has been there and done that in the recent past. The wisest thing he is doing right now is looking into everything before he speaks about what he will do or how long it will take.
Buying back Elland Road from the property developers and restoring a team “in good time” are all on the chairman‘s agenda. When he entered Stamford Bridge, he fought property companies and local authorities to prevent housing on the pitch there — and though his detractors now point out that the stadium is enveloped by a hotel, restaurants and other real estate commissioned by Bates, the football field remains at the centre of everything.
Elland Road was sold last year in desperation to reduce the crippling debt pile, and Bates talked on Friday of exercising the buy-back option on that deal “in due course”. Until then, the club has to lease its own ground from the property company that owns it.
Bates might prove as patient, as obdurate or as accommodating as it takes to win that negotiation. But first, he addresses the prospect, marginal though it appears, of coping with promotion back to the Premiership. “I certainly wouldn’t like to get promoted this year,” he says. “If you go up too soon, you more than likely come down again.”
His talks to manager Kevin Blackwell will be intriguing — take us up, but not just yet? Blackwell, a former goalkeeper, has overseen the departures of the likes of Viduka, Smith and Kewell and their millionaire salaries and agents and rebuilt a team that is mid-table.
“I told Kevin I know nothing about his ability,” remarked Bates in the first hours of the new chairmanship. “But I’ll give him my full support and he will be judged on results. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.” And there is as much substance to Yorkshire pud as there is to any of the richly hollow fillings to be had in Monte Carlo.

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