FEW people played a greater role than Ken Bates in revolutionising and globalising English football.
During his controversial 21-year reign as chairman, Chelsea fielded England’s first all-foreign starting XI, appointed a string of overseas managers and eventually sold to Roman Abramovich — the first foreigner to buy a Premier League club.
Yet as Chelsea’s latest owners, Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, appoint Enzo Maresca as their fifth manager in two years, Bates hates what English football has become.
He told SunSport: “Most clubs are the playthings of multi-billionaire Arabs or (like Chelsea) part of American wealth fund portfolios, people who know nothing and care even less about football.
“Football clubs used to be run by men like Jack Walker, who loved their local community.
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“I met Jack once and said, ‘I’m very proud of what you achieved at Blackburn. I admire you immensely but I wouldn’t want to be you’.
“He asked why not and I told him, ‘Because I wouldn’t want to live in f***ing Blackburn!’.”
Bates offered me a rare interview in the Monaco tax haven he and his third wife, Suzannah, have called home for 20 years because he’d read a column in which I’d poured manure over the ills of modern football.
He sees me as a kindred spirit and, while I’m not entirely sure about that, a 2½-hour lunch with Old Greybeard is an in-depth education and a glorious entertainment.
At 92, Bates retains a sharp mind and an acid tongue. He swears like a docker and is spectacularly rude about most of the people he encountered in football.
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He sees himself as a working-class outsider, always standing up for smaller clubs.
After the scrapping of FA Cup replays and the lack of proper recompense for those further down the pyramid, he proposes that all 72 Football League clubs resign from the FA — a reverse of the European Super League, with the rank-and-file breaking away from the elite.
Bates says: “They should persuade non-league clubs to join them and find out what the FA would do when their Cup only has 20 entrants.
“But the EFL haven’t got anybody with enough balls to do it. The FA is feckless and f***ing useless.”
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It’s now 20 years since Bates left Chelsea, after serving a further nine months as chairman following the sale to Abramovich.
That deal was done within 48 hours of Bates even knowing who the Russian oligarch was.
But Bates soon disliked what the club became, and also decried Abramovich for appointing former Manchester United chief executive Peter Kenyon, “who couldn’t run a f***ing egg-and-spoon race”.
He adds: “It became a different club. The trouble is Russia is a communist state based on fear...
“Licking the a**e of the guy above you and s**ting in the face of the bloke beneath you. It’s crude but it sums it up. That’s how Chelsea went. The culture changed.
“London-based Russians were using our executive boxes to discuss deals with Vladimir Putin.”
Abramovich tried to buy Tottenham first but, Bates says, Spurs chairman “Daniel Levy always wanted a bit more”.
To understand Bates best, it is instructive to hear him discuss his 1982 takeover of a bankrupt Chelsea from the Mears family, who founded the club 77 years earlier, and aristocratic chairman Viscount Chelsea.
Bates recalls: “They told me, ‘We’ve got two cheques — one for the FA and one for the wages — which one shall we bounce?’.
“I handed over a £300,000 cheque on the Friday. Viscount Chelsea then asked if I’d like to be their guest tomorrow for the match. I thought, ‘Great, I’m being invited to attend a match at a club I’ve just bought!’.
“Knowing my place in the working class, I said, ‘That’s very kind of you my Lord, I accept’.
“The next day 30 people were having a four-course lunch — all the directors, their wives and kids.
“Champagne, wine, brandy, port, big cigars — I said, ‘This lot said they couldn’t pay the players’ wages!’.
“They were giving away 700 free tickets. I stopped the lot, making 700 enemies for life.
“One of the Mears family said, ‘My great-grandfather built this club’. I said, ‘Yeah and your father f***ed it up! You want tickets? Walk 50 yards and you’ll see the ticket office’.”
Bates — a father of five, with “15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and two more on the way” — spent much of his time in football eating with people he despised.
Like one disgraced FA exec who “left his wife for a woman who was as fat as he was but was a vegetarian. I was at dinner where they served his wife lamb chops so he stuck the chops in his suit pocket”.
Or a colleague who “was an arrogant b****d with a snotty-nosed b**ch of a wife. I was at dinner where she was served the finest foie gras and she said, ‘I don’t eat tinned meat’. He split up with her and said, ‘As long as I can keep the dog . . . ’.”
Bates was brought up by his grandparents in Hanwell, West London. Despite being born “a cripple” with a club foot, he came close to being a professional footballer.
He adds: “I had seven unsuccessful operations before a doctor walked past at Great Ormond Street Hospital and said he could fix it for £20 cash — and did.
“I was right-footed but not having any instep, the ball went everywhere, so I trained myself to be left-footed.
“I wanted to be a footballer — I didn’t drink, smoke or go with girls.
“When I was 20 I realised I’d wasted my f***ing youth!”
He got as far as Arsenal’s youth team before a motorcycle accident “b***ered my knee” — then made his fortune in business, owned Oldham Athletic and a major share in Wigan before buying a Chelsea side on the brink of the Third Division.
Bates says: “But 16 years later we won the European Cup-Winners’ Cup on the smell of an oily rag.”
That was under Gianluca Vialli, who replaced Ruud Gullit as player-manager and was succeeded by Claudio Ranieri — this when foreign bosses were rare in English football.
Bates says: “Gullit spent too much time on commercial interests. I’d see him posing in black swimming trunks on the back of London buses.
“I told him to stop playing. He said, ‘I’ll decide that’ — he was very arrogant. I said, ‘Yeah and I will decide when I stop paying you’.”
Vialli and Ranieri were favourites of Bates, who speaks with affection about Gianfranco Zola, Roberto Di Matteo, Celestine Babayaro, Frank Leboeuf and Marcel Desailly — most of whom were part of that all-foreign XI which played at Southampton on Boxing Day 1999.
But he credits captain Dennis Wise for ensuring there were no cliques, insisting only English was spoken in the dressing room.
All that was a far cry from the Chelsea Bates inherited, which had hooligan and racism problems — with the National Front to the fore.
Infamously, Bates put in electrified fences at the Bridge but the council wouldn’t let him switch them on.
That story sees Bates remembered as an acolyte of Margaret Thatcher — the Prime Minister who declared war on football fans with a proposed ID card scheme, only ditched after the Hillsborough disaster.
Bates says: “We’d had a pitch invasion and I was a farmer then.
“Cows s**t all over the place, s**t on tomorrow’s breakfast — so you used electric wire to control them.
“One of my guys said, ‘Why don’t you use it on the fences at Chelsea?’ People accused me of wanting to murder my own family and other bulls**t.
“Thatcher said hooliganism was football’s problem. I said, ‘No, football reflects society’.
“David Evans, a Tory MP, was chairman of Luton. They’d had Millwall fans rioting, so Evans tried to score political points with Thatcher by banning away supporters.
“Chelsea were Luton’s next visitors. He banned away supporters and sent us our usual allocation for the directors’ box. I gave the directors’ tickets up to ordinary Chelsea fans and didn’t go myself.
“When Luton visited us, I banned their directors and invited ordinary fans into the directors’ box.”
And that’s Ken Bates — at least Ken Bates’ version of Ken Bates. An ordinary bloke who stood up to the powerful, the arrogant, the feckless and the f***ing useless.
Whether you believe him or not, he is always worth listening to.
