It will have to go shopping for new, younger players this summer after a possible clear-out of its ageing squad, but the £19m attempted signing of Ruud van Nistelrooy by Manchester United showed how expensive such purchases can be.Where the money will come from is unclear. Mr Bates has ruled out spending the £50m invested by BskyB on new players, but intends to plough it into the long-term future of the group as a whole. So there will be huge pressure on the club’s kitty at a time when it already spends so much – £26.5m a year, or around two-thirds of the club’s total revenues, on team wages while the Chelsea Village complex still remains an unproven source of income. Those Millennium Suites have got to sell.So far Mr Bates has seen off the doubters, staging a series of coups including the BskyB deal which valued Chelsea at no less than £400m – second only to the Premiership Champions Manchester United who top the £1bn mark.The stock market has different ideas, putting a price tag of less than £100m on Chelsea And the investment has not yet started to prove its worth. Chelsea’s last results for the year to 30 June 1999 showed a £507,000 pre-tax loss compared to a £2.1m profit before. This was in part due to a hefty interest bill on loans for the West stand while it was still fighting the local planners. But there were also problems at the recently acquired EDT travel agency where rapid expansion plus falling demand led to a £1m loss, and later investigations found a breakdown in financial controls.This embarrassing episode led to Mr Bates strengthening his management squad, with the appointment of a group chief executive, Peter Bewsey, from Corporate Services Group.Despite this appointment, Mr Bates remains the driving force of the group, (and he still lives in a penthouse flat right next to the pitch).

But, while there has been no obvious let-up in his commitment, his age at 67 does raise succession questions.The chairman has transformed a faltering team living on past glories and housed in a stadium it didn’t own. He set up a separate independent company “Chelsea Pitch Owners”, owned by fans, to buy the freehold of the Stamford Bridge pitch to protect it from development in perpetuity. Mr Bates has created a brand name here and abroad – a third of the club’s website hits come from overseas. And he spotted commercial opportunities – not least the BskyB link-up which will look at ways of exploiting the wireless WAP technology to beam matches to mobile phones.But he is still a long way from fulfilling his twin dreams of a west London leisure development to match Covent Garden and a football team capable of taking its place alongside Europe’s greatest.

The danger is that in striving for both he could end up with neither.. P&O Nedlloyd, the AngloDutch container shipping joint venture, yesterday lost its chief executive, Tim Harris, with immediate effect. P&O Nedlloyd, the AngloDutch container shipping joint venture, yesterday lost its chief executive, Tim Harris, with immediate effect.
Lord Sterling, P&O chairman, said: “There was a divergence of views between Tim and the rest of the board on issues relating to the future management of the group, and he has therefore decided to pursue his career elsewhere.”Mr Harris , who also sat on the main P&O board, was once seen as a successor to Lord Sterling. Recently, it is thought, he was jockeying for position in the part of P&O that will remain after the group’s cruise business is floated off in October.It is thought that his departure was linked to his position in the remainder of P&O, and not to the financial performance of P&O Nedlloyd.