The emails have occasionally dropped from Ken Bates’ PAs in the past five or six years – either Tracey or Susan, relating that ‘Mr Bates’ had read something I had written. Would I call him so he might relate details that he considered ‘of journalistic interest’? The topic would be Chelsea. Always Chelsea. The club that was so clearly the love of his life.Last year, he wanted to tell me he abhorred the way Todd Boehly and his acolytes – ‘money men’ rather than football men, as he saw them – had turned the club into a financial instrument. Though fans of Chelsea and Leeds United may scoff at the notion of Bates, who has died aged 94, pontificating on how clubs should be run, Stamford Bridge would be a very different place had it not been for him. Recency bias leads many to say that Roman Abramovich saved Chelsea. There is a very strong case to say that Bates did.He fell out with so many people that he’d lost count, with bans from his clubs or vituperative match programme notes his weapons of choice. You might say that the late Doug Ellis of Aston Villa was a ‘football man’, yet Bates mocked the fact that a stand was named after him. When Villa built a new one for Euro ’96, he declared: ‘They’re going to call it the Other Doug Ellis Stand.’But there was a reason why the Chelsea Supporters’ Trust issued a statement on Sunday declaring it was ‘deeply saddened’ by the death of Bates at his long-time home in Monaco. When he bought the club for £1 in 1982, they were on their knees -in deep financial trouble, struggling before crowds of 13,000 in the Second Division, to which they’d had been relegated three years earlier. Only the bank overdraft was keeping them in business.The spending Bates sanctioned on Kerry Dixon, David Speedie, Pat Nevin and Mickey Thomas, bringing a joyous return to the First Division in 1984, formed the backdrop to an existential battle against a bigger enemy: the property company who owned the Stamford Bridge freehold and gave the club notice to quit in 1989. Former Chelsea chairman and owner Ken Bates has died at the age of 94 Bates famously bought Chelsea for just £1, and sold the club to Roman Abramovich in 2003 Bates took over at Leeds United in 2005 after their relegation to the ChampionshipThe ensuing legal struggle, which turned out to be Bates’ finest hour in football, was one that he, with his cussed, confrontational, litigious and sometimes deeply unpleasant style, was made for. It was when he’d won it that he had the vision to establish the Chelsea Pitch Owners, the supporter-led entity which preserved the stadium in perpetuity and remains one of the strongest protections of any fanbase in English football.That combative style still made Bates a loathed figure among some at Chelsea, just like everywhere else. This was a time when hooliganism had the British game in its grip. Chelsea fans were involved in violent scenes at Derby County during the first year back in the First Division and their away fixtures were declared all-ticket for the remainder of the season. Bates’ solution was a 12 foot-high 12-volt electric perimeter fence at Stamford Bridge to deal with pitch invaders. It took Greater London council’s intervention to prevent this on safety grounds.But his reinvention of Stamford Bridge as the Chelsea Village plc leisure complex was ahead of its time in broadening income streams, even though it is now viewed as an anchor on expanding the stadium at times. By the time he sold the club to Roman Abramovich for £140million in 2003, it had been reborn.He used his ego and powers of persuasion to seek out those players he wanted for his club. This included asking Liverpool’s Graeme Souness for meeting at the Holiday Inn, on Liverpool’s Paradise Street in 1984, to see if he would sign for Chelsea. He offered Souness the use of a house he had on Guernsey and said he could just fly into London on a Thursday, to train and play. Souness turned him down, but the hiring of Ruud Gullit and Gianluca Vialli as managers, with Marcel Desailly, Gianfranco Zola, Roberto Di Matteo in their teams created a stardust without which Abramovich would not have arrived and turbocharged the ascent. Matthew Harding provided much of the money. Bates fell out with him too.The £80m debt Bates racked up spoke of what was to follow in football for him, because parsimony and thrift were not in his lexicon and it would be a fight against the losses forever after.His ambition at Leeds, relegated to the second tier and sinking under the debts accumulated in the Peter Ridsdale era when he arrived in 2005, was to replicate what he had achieved at Chelsea. But there was nothing more than turmoil, ceaseless litigation and open warfare with a fanbase whose reasonable demands for transparency led him to describe them as ‘morons.’He cleared the debts by declaring the club insolvent, wiping away unsecured creditors. Players like Danny Mills, who had not played a competitive match for Leeds for four years, had to be paid the £216,667 owing to him in full, while the West Yorkshire ambulance service, owed £8,997, and St John Ambulance, £165, had to settle for a fraction. The ensuing 10-point deduction took Leeds down into League One, where a further 15-point penalty followed.Bates, by then a tax-exile resident in Monaco, who owned Leeds via a company registered in the tax haven of Nevis, West Indies, unleashed on pretty much everyone in a bizarre series of programme notes after fans demanded an explanation for the running of their club and an understanding of who, other than Bates, actually owned it. Bates, pictured with wife Suzannah, is remembered as one of English football’s most controversial characters Bates and former Chelsea manager Claudio Ranieri on pre-season tour in Malaysia in 2003 Bates helped bring glamour to Stamford Bridge in the 1990s with the arrival of Ruud Gullit‘Educational standards have been destroyed by left-wingers and trendy liberals,’ he wrote in one programme. ‘Corporal and capital punishment should be brought back. Single mothers should be put into hostels and benefits slashed. This is a rather long way of saying that I am unimpressed by the demonstrations of a few morons last Saturday, and I ain’t going anywhere soon.’The qualities that made him admired by some at Chelsea – confrontation, financial pragmatism and a refusal to be intimidated – rendered him toxic at Leeds. As of last night, there had been no response from Leeds United or its fans to news of Bates’ death. None is expected.His departure from that club in 2014 was followed by the widespread condemnation of his deeply unfortunate comments about a number of Chelsea youth-team footballers who had claimed they were racially abused by their own coaches during his 22-year tenure there. Bates claimed the ‘sniff of money is in the air.’He will be remembered for controversies more than for the contribution he made to British football, though the clashes belie his long journey through the game. He had owned Oldham Athletic and Wigan Athletic before Chelsea and the myriad businesses he’d built his personal fortune from – haulage, quarrying, ready-mix concrete and dairy farming – also speak to a monumental energy. Not bad, he would have said, for a boy raised by his grandparents in a council flat on a sink estate in Ealing, west London, whose hopes of playing football had been confounded by the club foot he was born with.The conversations he and I had were of ‘journalistic interest’ in the perspective they provided from an individual who had lived in the white heat of the sport and was at the bridge to a new era of the unimaginable wealth he’d never known. ‘You’re only a custodian,’ he once said. ‘You’re there for a period of time and then someone else takes over.’