Where did you buy your rose tinted spectacles mate ?
Ken bought us for a quid and £1.5 million debt....he left us with a £80 million debt, and walked off as a multimillionaire on the back of the RA deal
He had no discernable plan of how we were going to pay back that eurobond and it was secured against the stadium.
He has left us the gift of the CPO, for which I am grateful, but despite our supposed worldwide following it still has only 12.000 members.
He's also bequeathed us the "village" with the ludicrous hotel complex that dwarfs the shed.
He fought his legal battles with the "save the Bridge" fund
All in all , good riddance to him. I thank him for two things, the CPO and pissing off Leeds !!
ilderton do you have a mortgage on your house? Do you make the mortgage payments every month? Is your house now worth considerably more than the mortgage remaining on it? If it is, the value of the asset should ultimately help service the debt.
Factually I think you are wrong fella. Apart from the eurobond we had numerous loans at the time from different lenders at different rates of borrowing. Bate's and Trevor Birch were trying to consolidate the loans and reschedule the payment periods. Were we going to lose the ground over that? In all probability, no. The value of the assets Bate's had created were still considerably more than the sum owed.
As Birch said at the time;
"
We needed to reschedule and stretch some of the commitments that we had," he says. "The [£75m] Eurobond was a lump payment each year. There were other commitments, football commitments with players who had been bought but who hadn't been paid for, that needed to be rescheduled.
"I think the financial side [at Chelsea] would have become an issue if certain actions weren't taken so all the plans were geared around stabilising the position, while certain contracts unwound. Chelsea had been caught by the acceleration of the transfer market which then left us with probably more players than we needed on probably more lucrative contracts than was prudent and therefore we had to try to untangle all those, contain things in order to rejuvenate the club."
It had also become clear that if an investor could be found, Chelsea would listen. "That had been ongoing," says Birch. "I had feelers out there and one of the banks that we had been talking to on our possible securitisation of all the debts, consolidation of all the debts, Abramovich had been talking to them".
If we take that at face value, and I see no reason why we shouldn't, the most likely outcome would have been the attempted sale of higher earning players, a smaller transfer budget and reduced playing staff. Yep, that may well have made us a weaker team on the pitch but it doesn't mean we would have ceased to exist as Chelsea FC which was a real possibility the minute the Mears family flogged off the Stamford Bridge freehold to developers.
The hotel is now considered a white elephant but Bates' thinking at the time was clear and logical, that we couldn't survive and grow on match-day gate receipts alone we needed to find new 24/7 income streams. Hence the hotel, Bluebells, the megastore, museum, restaurant, leisure club. The banks obviously thought it a credible business plan at the time otherwise they wouldn't have fronted up the money.
Ken Bates made mistakes, no argument. He was a stubborn, abrasive, polarising character but that stubborness ultimately served us all well in the battle to save our club. I can think of no other football Chairman, past or present, who could have fought the fight that Bates did over a decade and win. For that he always be a true Chelsea Legend in my eyes.
Personally it's bates who has given me a personality disorder when ever I go to my mates drum in rural kent and see he's duck and chicken pen with the Electric fence stopping the animals from getting in and out of it I always think of bates