Bates Out! This time for good.
Sunday, 12th Jul 2026 21:43 by Tim Whelan
It was announced yesterday that our beloved former chairman Ken Bates has passed away at the age of 94. And it’s fair to say that the news has led to something of a mixed response on social media.
A very brief statement on the official Leeds United website says “The thoughts of everyone at Leeds United are with the family, friends and former colleagues of Ken at this difficult time”. And while the reaction of some Leeds fans has been that you shouldn’t speak ill of the recently deceased, I’ve read plenty of comments similar to this one, “Bloke was an absolute **** and is now dead, thank god! ”
Bates made his fortune in the haulage and ready-mix concrete industries, and his first foray into football ownership was at Oldham in the 1970s, and he then move on to be co-owner of Wigan Athletic. But it was his spell in charge of Chelsea that relay brought him to the nation’s attention, after he bought them for £1 in 1982, but took on their debts of around £1.5m.
And that was in the days when £1.5m was a lot of money. Bates got tough with their notorious hooligans and eventually got them into a position where they were a sufficiently attractive proposition for Roman Abramovic to pay £140m for the West London club in 2003. But in the process he was never far away from a row with someone, not least when he put an electric fence round the top of the fences at Stamford Bridge.
Thankfully the local council declined to give him permission to switch it on! He also fell out with mega-rich fan Matthew Harding, over whether they should be investing in the team or the stadium and it’s surrounds. It became a feature of Bates’ spells at various organisations that on the land surrounding various stadia there would be property schemes going on that never quite worked out.
He tried a similar wheeze while he was chair of the committee in charge of the new Wembley, only to resign when none of the others would go along with his ideas. And at Leeds there were all manner of proposals for Elland Road an it’s surrounds, but the only building work that actually happened was the £7m upgrade to the corporate facilities in the East Stand.
This was at a time when our best players were leaving on a regular basis, when Bates refused to offer any contract renewals to match the wages the likes of Norwich could offer, and we had to bring in a job lot of players from Portsmouth because they were cheap. Bates had got his hands on Leeds in 2005 after the Krasner consortium gave up the struggle of trying to service the club’s debts.
Some fans say that Bates rescued the club at his time, but others insist that there were alternative offers available, but Bates persuaded Krasner to make a quick sale to him. We almost got back into the Premier League a year later, but after a play-off final defeat to Watford we went swiftly in the opposite direction after our Parachute payments ended, with the biggest problem being that the last of the huge Ridsdale-era players contracts didn’t expire until June 2007.
And by then we owed a large sum of money to the taxman, so as soon as our relegation to League One was confirmed Bates put us into liquidation. Once again there were other parties interested in taking control of the club, but the die was cast once the administrators accepted that the biggest creditor (Astor Investments) were not related to Ken Bates.
And this was despite Astor only being willing to write off their £17.6 million investment if Bates retained control of the club! So Bates kept control of the club while also wiping off a huge chunk of the debt, but he was always very evasive when asked who was behind the companies who were keeping us going.
The other creditors, especially HMRC, were never going to accept this, so we were never going to exit administration with the CVA (Creditors Voluntary Agreement) required by league rules. And without one it wasn’t certain whether we would be able to start the 2007/8 season. After trouble at Stamford Bridge many years earlier Bates had said:-
“I shall not rest until Leeds United are kicked out of the Football League. Their fans are the scum of the Earth, absolute animals and a disgrace. I will do everything in my power to make this happen.” And he was close to achieving that ambition in 2007, but the league eventually settled on a 15 point deduction from the Football Leage at the start of our first ever season in the third tier.
It took us three years to get back into the Championship, where a decade of stagnation began on Bates’ watch. And as fan discontent led to a few demonstrations and a protest march, Bates demonstrated his keenness to crack down on dissent.
Then Supporters Trust chair Gary Cooper was singled out as the supposed ringleader and banned from being able to buy match tickets, as well as being on the receiving end of comments in the Bates propaganda sheet that the matchday programme had become. Meanwhile Bates was setting up regional membership groups he could control, at the expense of the long-established supporters club.
Eventually his eight-and-a-half year tenure as chairman came to an end, and his parting gift was to pass the baton on to potless chancers GFH Capital, in July 2013. The less said about them the better. That was the end of Bates last adventure in English football, and he shuffled off to his retirement in the tax haven of Monaco.
But some fans have fonder memories of Bates, and Mark Monk, my fellow writer on this site, has posted on social media “If you wrote to him he would respond, and he was on the phone for 5-10 minutes”. Apparently this included a bit of colourful language, for which his “lovely” wife Susannah frequently apologised!
And although I was frequently critical of him during his time at our club, and went on Gary Cooper’s protest march, I can think of three specific things I agreed with him on. Firstly during the 1980s he was a die-hard opponent of Luton’s ban on away fans. Then when the 2022 World Cup was awarded to Qatar he wrote in the programme that it should have gone to Australia as they would have made an excellent job of it.
And finally, when the infamous Aaron Cawley came onto the pitch at Hillsborough and pushed the Sheffield Wednesday goalie, Bates said “let’s send him to Afghanistan and see how brave he really is”. That was typical Ken Bates, forthright as ever. Other fans might be commenting that “it’s been a busy weekend in hell”, but maybe it’s time to let the old bugger rest in peace.
Reuters
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