Ken Bates, and the anatomy of a nobody

From the Archive

With no taxes or duties to pay, he could import cheap materials and labour, build until he could build no more, and not a single penny of the profits would be lost for 199 years. Kenneth Bates didn’t just have a lease on Anegada: he had the beginnings of an empire. Within his borders, however, Ken Bates also had Noel Lloyd.

From 2011, the full story of how Bates was ready to make $300 million in the Caribbean — and the statues that still stand to people who stood in his way.

Read here

I will always maintain that Ken Bates was a failure in terms of football and his own ambitions, but he had succeeded enough early enough — selling cement — that he could afford to keep failing over and over and selling that as success.

Famously, he bought Chelsea for £1 in 1982, and sold it for £140m in 2003. But his personal profit was only £17m after 21 years of work — £800,000 a year. Within a decade Chelsea were worth a billion dollars, and when Blueco bought the club in 2022, they paid £4.25 billion, or £226.6 million for every year Roman Abramovich had owned it. Arguably Chelsea would be worth much more if their ground redevelopment plans weren't restricted by the 'village' of hotels and apartments, built by Bates, hemming them in at Stamford Bridge. 

Why could Ken Bates not turn Chelsea into a multi-billion pound club himself? Instead he was reduced to sniping at Roman Abramovich from the safety of Leeds, taking satisfaction from naming one of his holding companies 'Roman's Heavies', while Abramovich took satisfaction from realising Chelsea's lucrative potential.

It was the same pattern in the British Virgin Islands in the 1960s. In Tortola and Anegada, Bates had the possibility of making a $50 million fortune — $300 million at today's prices. After it had all gone wrong the British government were prepared to settle with him at $6.8 million, but Bates only ended up with $5.8 million while grousing publicly that it had all been very unfair. His personal profit was about $1.5 million, 1/200th of what it could have been.

As for Leeds, in January 2005 Bates paid £10m for 50 per cent of a club that was being valued around £25m. Under his ownership, the club that had existed since 1919 went out of business, and he never revealed how much he paid to buy it back, from what he claimed was an anonymous consortium that left him in place after founding a new company out of administration. When he sold Leeds United to Gulf Finance House Capital it was for £52m. 

Within eight years, without Bates, the club was in the Premier League and valued at £400m. Not only had he failed to realise £350m of value to his own advantage, he'd been kicked out of Elland Road sooner than he'd planned. His deal with GFH Capital was supposed to make him club president — "Nothing has changed," said his chief executive, Shaun Harvey, when the takeover was announced in 2012. Weeks after Bates took that title, GFH Capital used a dispute over his use of a private jet to break the agreement. 

When Bates 'ceased to be President of Leeds United Football Club', as GFH Capital put it, I suspect losing the title hurt him more than missing out on the billions that more effective club owners have made from the Premier League era. I'm not even sure the money was ever the point.