His sustained financial investment in Leicester City, awareness of the club’s emotional significance and his human touch set Vichai apart from some other overseas owners

As the awful news broke over Saturday night of the crashed helicopter in which the Leicester City owner, Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha, two pilots and as yet unnamed fellow passengers had been travelling, the emotional responses of supporters illustrated how appreciated the Thai magnate had been.

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Flags, flowers and other offerings were laid outside the stadium sponsored by his duty free company, King Power, and tributes paid: to his stewardship of the club, personal munificence and philanthropy to good causes in Leicester. Towering over these qualities to claim fans’ admiration was, of course, the wildly unlikely Premier League title win of 2016, which followed sustained financial investment – Vichai spent more than £100m to bankroll the club’s 2014 promotion from the Championship. That and his human and communal touch set him apart from some other overseas investors who have made themselves unpopular since buying English clubs in a burgeoning trend after the Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea in 2003.

Vichai’s regular presence at Leicester matches differentiated him from many clubs’ absentee owners – and his helicopter’s regular take-off from the King Power pitch was inescapably, and now tragically, emblematic of overseas ownership. Many modern-day owners struggle with the effort, not helped by Britain’s strained train system and clogged roads, to get to their clubs, which were previously run by local businessmen who drove short distances from their homes to designated spaces at the ground.

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Leicester City are as representative of this football evolution, from earnest Victorian beginnings to overseas billionaire ownership, as any of the other clubs bought by investors in modern times. Their formation in 1884 was agreed at a meeting in a garden shed behind a house on Fosse Road, by young men who had been at Wyggeston School together and attended bible classes at the nearby Emanuel Chapel. Like most clubs, Leicester Fosse could not sustain that character as an extension of church and school old-boy associations, as football surged in popularity and moved rapidly into professionalism. Three years after being elected to the Football League’s relatively new Second Division in 1894, the club fell into a financial crisis and was rescued after a meeting in the Temperance Hall, Granby Street, by an injection of money into a newly formed limited company.

Owners and directors of these new companies were mostly local businessmen who financially supported the clubs and termed themselves custodians. As Football Association rules were designed to prevent them making personal profits from their shares, they gained more from the involvement and enhanced local profile and connections. This structure underpinned the game’s accumulation of heroes and heritage, the Football League’s expansion to four divisions by 1921 and the clubs embedding of their colours in the loyalty of generations.

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It was only following the break-up of the Football League after 104 years, by the First Division clubs forming the Premier League in 1992 and doing the first TV deal with BSkyB, that club “owners” began seriously to cash in on their shares.

At Leicester, like many others, the local owners floated the club on the stock market. The flotation, in 1997, raised £10m but was not enough to keep the club competitive in a rising tide of player wages and, although the regime managed to build the new stadium, City fell into administration in 2003. They were saved by a local consortium including Greg Clarke, now the FA chairman, and Jon Holmes, the long-term Leicester supporter and agent to Gary Lineker. Then in 2007 the American-Serbian entrepreneur Milan Mandaric, an early overseas investor in football clubs’ rising values, took over and he made a substantial gain when he sold it to Vichai for £39m in 2010.

While football’s original charitable, public-service structures did not survive into the era of multibillion‑pound media deals, a core of its founding sentiment has endured. Some other overseas owners have been reviled for draining money out, undermining a club’s heritage or failing to respect supporters’ loyalty. Vichai brought success, above all, to Leicester but he also demonstrated awareness of his club’s emotional and civic significance. He was thanked and admired for that and appreciated for making it to matches which, in this modern age, involved flying in and out by helicopter.