U
sually when a new
owner joins a club,
there’s a bounce, an
added energy and
some renewed sense
of expectation. Enter
Oldham Athletic, who
arrive for their latest
Second Division fixture
at a ground that’s long
since fallen into a state
of disrepair, and a short
while later will become
notorious as the first in
the world to try (the
operative word – they
weren’t allowed to)
controlling supporters
via the subtle-as-a-brick
use of electricity.
The date is April 3, 1982. The location is
Stamford Bridge. And the natives? Well, let’s
just say they’re as restless as a fan trying to
climb over a fence with 12 volts coursing
through it. Watching their team is proving
a similarly shocking experience.
“Kenneth Bates may well be pondering the
wisdom of his recent move southwards,”
wrote The Times. “After moving from Wigan
Athletic to become a director of Chelsea and
agreeing to erase their debts, he watched his
new side squander a two-goal lead against
Oldham. The crowd of 8,938 was the lowest
of Chelsea’s season.”
Records, however, are there to be broken,
and that figure was depressingly lowered
four days later when only 6,196 disillusioned
souls reluctantly left the pub to sit through
the visit of Cambridge United. If Bates hoped
that his £1 purchase would galvanise a club
plummeting at an alarming rate, then he was
left bitterly disappointed. And if the players
thought it would usher in an era of largesse,
so were they.
“I earned more bricklaying and playing for
Harrow Borough than I did when I signed for
Chelsea [in 1980],” admits Chris Hutchings,
the future Bradford and Wigan manager who
was there when Bates made an atypically
low-key introduction.
So desperate was the situation, even the
Blues’ fundraising lottery was losing money.
Forty years ago in west London, no one was
feeling very lucky...FOLLOW THE MONEY
On the morning of the Oldham match, Bates
had addressed Chelsea fans to assure them
that the club’s future was now in safe hands.
Before he fed the press, though, the Ealing
native had to find his way around a ground
that would become his home from home for
more than two decades. “I had to ask my
way to the secretary’s office when I arrived,”
he told the assembled hacks. “The first thing
I can tell Chelsea’s fans is that the problems
with the club’s finances have been resolved.”
Sharp-tongued, ruthless and smart, Bates
made his fortune by any means necessary: in
haulage, in South African land development,
in Australian sugar cane, in dairy farmingand even cement. Oldham had offered his
first avenue into football, as chairman in the
’60s, before he became co-owner and vice
chairman of Wigan. Not all of his business
interests had succeeded. In 1976, the Irish
Trust Bank he set up infamously collapsed
and left thousands of investors out of pocket.
After a legal war, Bates escaped unscathed.
Six years on, Chelsea’s predicament offered
a glimpse into the future – for man and club.
The debt which had previously belonged to
them, along with Stamford Bridge itself, was
switched to a holding company which, in
turn, leased the ground back to the struggling
Second Division side. Bates then took care
to ensure that the seven-year lease could be
extended, and that any redevelopment of
Stamford Bridge would have to include the
club. It meant that if the ground Chelsea had
called home since 1905 was redeveloped for
any other purpose, then an alternative gaff
would have to be found for a team that last
won the league in 1955 and didn’t look likely
to trouble the engravers any time soon. The
days of triumphing in Europe – and Chelsea
had, lifting the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1971 –
were as distant as the view to the pitch from
a number of stands, which may as well have
been on Fulham Broadway itself. Instead,
the Blues were losing £12,000 a week and
stuck in quicksand.
In short, the club was a mess before Bates
showed up – and although their new owner’s
presence didn’t eradicate the difficulties, it
did at least make them substantially easierCHELSEA
to solve. Were it not for his intervention at
a club that only narrowly escaped relegation
to the third tier at the end of 1982-83, then
it’s more than possible neither Matthew
Harding nor Roman Abramovich would have
considered investing in an entity that could
have been jettisoned from SW6 altogether.
Like most things involving Chelsea down
the years, though, the road would be long,
winding and littered with potholes. In 1981,
the Blues had announced profits of £33,000
on a turnover of £1.3 million, mainly thanks
to the sale of several players – most notably
Ray Wilkins to Manchester United – that had
kept them narrowly out of the red. Interest
payments in their various debts, reckoned to
be in the region of £4.5m (the equivalent of
£14.5m in new money) were, according to
club accountant Martin Spencer, “crippling”.
The root of Chelsea’s financial mess could
be traced back to the proposed rebuilding of
Stamford Bridge. Buoyed by both FA Cup and
European success during the early 1970s,
Brian Mears, grandson of the club’s original
co-founder Joseph, was intent on furnishing
one of English football’s most swashbuckling
sides with an 80,000-capacity home befitting
the likes of Peter Osgood and Alan Hudson.
The revamped Bridge would boast stands
closer to the pitch, an electronic scoreboard
and even the potential to pipe warm air
under cold seats in the winter. The shining
centrepiece would be a new East Stand, the
largest of its kind in Britain.
By the time it was completed, however, it
threatened to become a monument to folly.
“The optimism of 1971 looked like hubris by
1973,” noted Rick Glanvill, Chelsea’s official
historian. By 1974-75, the spiralling costs
of rebuilding the stadium meant Chelsea’s
on-pitch fortunes had nosedived: only four
years after their victory in Europe, they were
relegated to the second tier.
To compound the Blues’ despair, a deep
recession bit, making supporters even more
reluctant to spend their hard-earned cash
watching a desperate band of no-hopers. As
Britain lurched into a financial catastrophe
and a three-day working week – inflation
ballooning from 9.2 per cent to 24.2 per cent
in two years – merely servicing the debt on
the East Stand was a job in itself.
And it wasn’t just the club’s cash flow that
was rushing out of control.FIGHT CLUB
Since 1977, Chelsea had been denied ticket
sale revenue – ring a bell? – as the result of
an away day ban for their fans. It followed
violence and off-field chaos in a 4-0 hiding
from Charlton at The Valley, leading Denis
Howell, Labour’s Minister for Sport, to go in
two-footed after the latest in an ugly string
of incidents that involved not just Chelsea
but Manchester United, Nottingham Forest
and Luton. For a government desperately
scrabbling to solve a problem that wouldn’t
go away, enough was enough.
“Most Chelsea fans following the club at
that point were good blokes, but there was
a real hardcore who were just there to causeAbove Blues fans
were notorious in
football’s era of
hooligan activity
Top “And up here
is where I can turn
on the electricity”74 June 2022 FourFourTwo