Ken Bates, who died on Sunday aged 94, bought Chelsea Football Club for £1 and sold it for enough to pocket £17 million personally. That arithmetic alone tells you most of what you need to know about the man.

Bates acquired Chelsea from the Mears family in 1982. The club was haemorrhaging cash, saddled with debt and sliding towards what was then Division Three. The asking price of £1 was not a bargain — it was a reflection of just how parlous the situation had become. Two decades of turbulent stewardship later, the club carried £97 million in debt when Roman Abramovich arrived in 2003. Bates still managed to extract £17 million from the Russian oil tycoon's purchase. In 2004, he gave a cordial farewell speech to the board over dinner; that same night, his solicitors lodged a writ seeking a further £2 million in alleged lost expenses. The club disputed the claim. That, too, tells you something.

The ground he saved, the managers he sacked

Before Abramovich, before the Champions League trophies, Stamford Bridge was under serious threat from property developers. Bates blocked that sale and, over time, built out the ground with a hotel, apartment block, megastore, catering operation and broadcasting ventures — commercial ideas that rival clubs have long since replicated. He also pushed, as a League chairman, for fairer distribution of Premier League television revenues and championed the principle of parachute payments for relegated clubs. Those two policies have shaped English football's finances ever since.

On the football side, his record was more mixed. Nine managers came and went during his chairmanship, several in circumstances that were sharply contested. He banned former Chelsea luminaries Ron Harris and Peter Osgood from the club after they criticised him publicly, and used his matchday programme notes as a vehicle for settling scores. Sir Alex Ferguson, not a man given to understatement, once compared him to Chairman Mao.

In 1985, Bates installed an electric fence around sections of Stamford Bridge to deter pitch invaders — an idea he said came to him during an early-morning walk around his Beaconsfield dairy farm, where a similar arrangement kept the cows in line. He had not sought permission from the council or the FA. The experiment was short-lived. He also invested £100,000 in Partick Thistle, at one point envisaging the Scottish club as a nursery side, and immediately decreed that all staff must wear only black shoes.

A self-made man from a council estate

Bates was born in Ealing, west London, and raised on a council estate. He was 16 before he discovered that the couple he knew as his parents were in fact his grandparents. His mother had died when he was 18 months old; his father left soon after. He was born with a club foot and endured four unsuccessful operations as a child before a fifth, in 1938 — funded by his grandfather scraping together £20 — finally worked. He played as a centre-forward at primary school and had a trial for Chase of Chertsey, an Arsenal feeder club at the time, though he accepted his foot ultimately limited how far he could go as a player. His grandmother funded his grammar school education by taking a cleaning job in secret, against his grandfather's wishes. At 15, Bates was offered a position on the ground staff at Brentford, but his headteacher persuaded him to stay in education.

He was, by his own description, a dog: hard-working, reluctant to give the ball up, disliking anyone getting the better of him. Those qualities defined his business career as much as anything he did on a playing field. Chelsea's transformation from a debt-ridden, third-tier-bound also-ran into a club capable of attracting a billionaire buyer was, whatever its complications, substantially his work.

Ken Bates was 94. He was, as a friend of his once put it, never dull.

Frequently asked

How much did Ken Bates pay for Chelsea FC?
Ken Bates bought Chelsea from the Mears family in 1982 for £1. The club was heavily in debt and in danger of dropping to the third tier of English football at the time.
How much did Bates make when he sold Chelsea to Abramovich?
When Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003, Bates personally received £17 million from the sale, despite the club carrying around £97 million in debt at the time.
What did Ken Bates do for English football beyond Chelsea?
As a League chairman, Bates pushed for fairer distribution of Premier League TV revenues and championed parachute payments for relegated clubs — both policies that remain central to how the English football pyramid is funded today.