‘The pleasure and the pain - Chelsea are both those things to me. It's hard to explain, but like any great love, I don't question it or feel tempted to stray. I just know that Chelsea and I were meant for each other.’

Matthew Harding's words will resonate with any Blues fan, indeed any football fan. The pleasure and the pain – it is what makes the sport we all love such a special one.

Harding's support for the Blues began in the early 1960s when his father, who had been based in the Chelsea Barracks during the Second World War and had grown an interest in the football team playing nearby, took him to Stamford Bridge for the first time. He was nine years old, and they used to watch from the stilted former North Stand.

Many years later, Matthew would have children of his own. His daughter Hannah is now, like her three siblings, Joel, Luke, and Patrick, a season ticket holder in the stand named after her dad. She explains how his passion bloomed.

Hannah: ‘When he was at boarding school, he was really, really into football, really, really into Chelsea. It became a bit of an obsession, and that's what he concentrated on. I suppose when you're at boarding school you've got a lot of time on your own, and it sort of went from there, really. But he was always quite obsessive with things, so if he was in something, he was properly into it.’

Harding's support for the club continued as he grew older, made a fortune in London's reinsurance markets, and got married and had children. Before long, his daughter Hannah and three sons were accompanying him to matches. Joel was the youngest.

Joel: ‘He lived and breathed Chelsea, so it was infectious, really. You had no choice. We were going home in a way, watching Chelsea, and it became our lives, really. He was just fun. It was about enjoying life, really, for him. Football was all about the day out.’

Hannah: ‘He was absolutely obsessed with Kerry Dixon. To the point he went to watch an England game once at the old Brighton Stadium, the Goldstone, because it said Dixon was playing. When we got there, it was Lee Dixon! And he wasn't interested in England, and there were no other Chelsea players playing for England, so we just stood there and then went home again.’

In the late '80s and early '90s, when Harding started regularly taking his children and traveling to away games, it was the future of Stamford Bridge rather than relegation to England's second tier that most concerned the club's hierarchy and supporters.

Earlier in the '80s, chairman Ken Bates had turned the club around from the brink of bankruptcy and helped John Neal's exciting side get promoted back to the top flight in 1984.

Now he was in the midst of a draining, decade-long battle against property developers and new ground owners, Marler Estates, who threatened to replace Stamford Bridge with luxury flats. Thankfully, a property market crash contributed to the collapse of the company that had taken on the Stamford Bridge lease. RBS took it over, and so Bates had more time to raise capital to buy the ground.

Chelsea Pitch Owners were set up to protect the victory, but transforming the ground into an all-seater venue would require substantial funds. Bates placed an advert in the Financial Times inviting investment, and Harding responded.

‘I'm told you think you're richer than I am, and I thought I'd better ring you to find out,’ Bates famously opened with when they spoke for the first time in September '93.

Hannah: ‘He never acted like he was wealthy. If you met him, you would never know that he had this wealth behind him. We weren’t exposed to it.’

Harding was worth £125 million. Few people in the country were wealthier. He more or less immediately invested £5 million in the club, and that, together with a £2 million football trust grant, kickstarted the redevelopment of Stamford Bridge into the 40,000-capacity all-seater venue we know today. Harding was also made a director and welcomed onto the Chelsea Village Board.

Joel: ‘It just changed overnight, really. We went from just coming to games, getting the train up, going to the Imperial beforehand, walking into the stadium, just as a normal fan, and then overnight, people wanted to talk to him. They wanted to come up and shake his hand and ask him about Chelsea and get in a conversation with him.’

Hannah: ‘He'd talk a lot, so he'd end up sat there where he talked to everyone and anyone who talked to him. For us, we’d gone up in the East Stand and we got really into coming to Chelsea. And then when he put the money in, suddenly we could get a bit behind the scenes. We used to go in the players' lounge behind the East Stand, or we'd get to go to an away game.

‘I remember one away game, I went to QPR and we were in the director's box. I've got pictures of me and Vinnie Jones and Graham Le Saux and Kerry Dixon, and it became a bit surreal, because you'd been used to being the normal fan, and then suddenly you’re like, “Oh my God.”’

Luke Harding vividly recalls a unique experience he and his brothers got to enjoy.

Luke: ‘One memory I've got after a game one Saturday, me, Joel, and Patrick snuck out onto the pitch and there was a load of footballs lying around. It was back when the Shed End had a temporary stand. Joel jumped into goal and we started having a kickabout and shooting into the goal. It one of the best memories of my life.

‘All of a sudden, the groundsman came out and started shouting at us! "What's going on? What are you doing over there?" We didn't know what to say! "Oh, I think Dad said it would be all right”. He went off to go find our Dad and it was all right in the end.’

For other Chelsea fans, Harding's emergence was exciting, as Trevor Nelson and, first, club historian Rick Glanvill remember.

Rick Glanvill: ‘As supporters, you saw this super fan who thought, "I've made more money than I could ever dream of. Why wouldn't I try and help my team? If they need money to build a stand, the North Stand, as it was, now the Matthew Harding Stand, why wouldn't I give them that money so they can build it? If they want to get a player, why wouldn't I make that money available?"’

Trevor Nelson: ‘We just saw this guy as our savour. Matthew Harding was a wealthy guy, a mad Chelsea fan. Ken Bates had been the governor for so long, he'd done a great job for Chelsea, controversial, but he kept the club afloat. But this guy was the injection we needed.’

Glanvill: ‘There was a sense that Matthew Harding was the everyman that had become a millionaire, and that we would all do that if we won the lottery or whatever. You know, you might try and buy a left back or something like that for your club. He could do that for real.’

Harding's investment was not unconditional. He wanted details on what was going on behind the scenes, and he didn't want his influence to be limited merely to the club's bricks and mortar. He felt he could play a part in helping freshen things up on the pitch, too.

The arrival of Glenn Hoddle as player-manager in the summer of '93, shortly before Harding got directly involved with the club, certainly helped in that respect, even if, as Hoddle recounts, there was plenty of work to do.

Glenn Hoddle: ‘When I first came here, the club was in a really poor state. It really was. I've got to say it. I came from Swindon, and they had better facilities than we had at Chelsea. It was as simple as that. There was no office at the training ground, no phone, let alone an office for the manager. It was ridiculous, it really was.

‘It was quite humorous at times, having a BT phone to make a call to Ron Atkinson with 50 pence that would drop through in front of all the apprentices putting the kit in. That was what Chelsea was at that time. I was doing a deal for Andy Townsend for over £2 million with a 50 pence coin that dropped in the BT box and came out, and I had to keep putting it back in.

‘That was when I said, ‘Look, something's got to happen here. I've got to change the mentality of the club.’ He could see that the club needed finances, that the squad needed some help. He wasn't going to do it drastically overnight, but he had a plan.

‘I saw him just as a real fan, as a real supporter. Everyone will say that. And that's what he was. When I first met him, I realised the enthusiasm that he had for Chelsea, but it was through the eyes of a fan, always, not as an investor or looking to be anything else. He had a real passion for Chelsea.

‘I loved working with him, I've got to say. It was really good fun to be around him. Very comical guy, made you laugh, but he had this drive about him. He was a successful businessman, but he had this real passion and drive to put Chelsea in another level. When we sat down when I first met him, you could see his ambitions were to keep himself as a fan, but to get himself in at the board level to try and take Chelsea up to the levels where he wanted them to go. He could see where they could go.

‘I think he felt me coming to the club at that time, I had those ambitions to take the club up to another level. They sort of matched each other, and that was why we probably gelled and got on very well.

‘There were times when I'd have my afternoon where I'd study the opponents or talk about the team, and then Matthew would give me a phone call out of the blue. "Glenn, I'd like you to come down to London and we'll have lunch." I said, "I can't, Matthew. I've got plans this afternoon." "Don't worry about it," he would say. "I want to talk about the vision I've got for Chelsea going forward."

‘In the end, I would accept and see him there at 1 o’clock. He’d have had a bottle of wine by then. We started having so-called lunch, and he said, "Come and have a drink." I said, "No, I'm driving. I can't have a drink."

‘So I sat there and I listened to his vision, and when he starts going, you could see the passion coming out of him. It was lovely. We had some real laughs, and it was very humorous. And the plans he was coming out, the money that he wanted to put in, the squad, you know, what players are we going to buy? And this was all over the so-called lunch. I don't know if we ate any food, we just had a good conversation.’

Harding never forgot his roots. The following quote, his words, epitomised his beliefs: ‘I think that football clubs have got to run themselves as businesses on the one hand, but never forgetting, of course, the soul and the spirit of the football club and how much it means to the respective supporters.’

That attitude was why he was viewed so favourably, not only by Chelsea supporters, but by football fans all over the country.

Glanvill: ‘He became a public figure well known to not just Chelsea fans, but fans all around the country. You would talk to people in pubs, and they would all go, "God, I wish we had a Matthew Harding."’

The players, too, grew to like the new director, including Frank Sinclair and Steve Clarke.

Clarke: ‘I knew him quite well. We spent a little bit of time in each other's company. He was a good man, a great catalyst for the club at that time. At the time when Matthew came in, he was fresh. He was enthusiastic.’

Sinclair: ‘I had a decent friendship with him. He always stopped to talk to me and loved football, loved chatting about it, loved being around the players and sampling it that way. You had that feeling that he just wished he was a player. You took that on board and tried to make him as happy as possible because you appreciated what he was trying to do at the football club.’

Harding, like Bates, wasn’t afraid to stick up for Hoddle when things got off to a bad start under his management.

Hoddle: ‘I had a hard time when I first came, in the first six months. We were second from bottom, and we'd just been beaten at Southampton. We were playing Newcastle. It was back in the day when you played two games in two days, and they were top of the league. Kevin Keegan was manager, and we had them at home.

‘I remember coming out at the Dell, the old Dell, and there were a few fans giving me real stick, especially as an ex-Tottenham player. They were, in a different way, nicely saying, "Why don't you go back to Tottenham?" You can imagine.

‘And I remember Matthew jumping off the bus. He saw it all happening, and he laid into them. He said what he had to say. I always remember that. And that was the balance between him and Ken, actually. Ken and I got a phone call that night in the hotel. He was on a cruise; he always used to go away. He phoned me from his cruise, somewhere in the Med or Barbados or wherever, to reassure me. "Don't worry about your job. Let's get on with it. A couple of results will turn it around."

‘And then you had Matthew confronting them as we're getting on the coach. So I had the support of both of the key people at the club, which was really good for me at the time. We came back here and we scrapped a 1-0 victory. We held on in the end because Newcastle were top of the league, flying, playing some great football, and that was the turn of it for us. We got ourselves back up the league and ended up going to the cup final that year.’

A season that had begun with Hoddle and Harding's arrival on the scene ended with a trip to Wembley, our first for a major final in a generation. Though the day out was spoiled by four unanswered Manchester United goals, the signs pointed to Chelsea Football Club being on the rise again. But more needed to be done.

Hoddle: ‘The main thing is what happens out there in 90 minutes of football on matchday, and that is when you rely on your players, the quality of your players, and the depth of the squad that you've got. Our depth was very sparse, very slim.

‘Matthew saw that. He worked hard on Ken as well to try and make him see it as well and make the ambitions a lot higher and the standard a lot higher and the demands. We put demands on the players like they've never been put on here before. And slowly but surely, you could see it coming around on the training ground, and the stadium, too.’

The new North Stand opened in November 1994, and Harding relocated his and his children's season tickets there from their previous spot in the East Upper. He still socialised with friends and family in the pub before and after games, normally in the Imperial on the Kings Road, but he would change into a suit and tie before kick-off and watch the action unfold from the director's box.

All the while, the friction between Bates and Harding was increasing. The pair fell out to such an extent Harding was banned from the directors' box. Hoddle and Colin Hutchinson, the longstanding chief executive, found themselves between the two.

Hoddle: ‘I was in the middle of that. Because Matthew was probably younger and closer to my age, I think Ken thought I was in his camp but no, I was in no-one's camp. I was the manager of the club, and it was difficult at times to be caught in the middle, but at the end of the day, I had to get my head down and think about the football side and get that right. I had to detach myself from what was happening at board level. Colin Hutchinson was good on that one.’

Hutchinson: ‘It was a very difficult time, and playing piggy in the middle was very, very draining. I did an article in the programme which gave the virtues of both sides and appealed to them to come together. But right until the end, the animosity was there, there was jealousy, there was envy, everything was thrown in there.’

Later, when the club was floated on the stock exchange in April '96, a détente between the pair was achieved. Loans were repaid, and Harding was named vice chairman after buying nine million shares ahead of the 96/97 season, Ruud Gullit’s first as player-manager.

Harding would never see the campaign's glorious conclusion. He and three friends, John Baldy, Tony Burridge, and Ray Dean, as well as pilot Michael Goss, were traveling back from the Blues’ League Cup third-round defeat at Bolton when their helicopter came down shortly before 11pm. A match programme found by firefighters at the scene was the first clue the victims were football fans.

The coaching staff and players were on the bus back to London when a reporter called at 1am with the news there were fears Matthew Harding was on board. Before 3am, moves were in place to get Harding's body identified. The tragic news was made public at 8am.

Immediately, fans – and not just those of a Chelsea persuasion – gathered at Stamford Bridge, laying flowers, shirts, pictures, scarves, mementos, and messages of love and respect.

Chelsea held a board meeting and agreed to name the North Stand the Matthew Harding Stand. Training was called off, as was a reserve game scheduled to be played that day. The Premiership agreed to a minute's silence at all games that weekend, including Chelsea's. The home fixture with Tottenham, three days later, would take place.

A mixture of disbelief and desolation engulfed the club as everyone mourned Harding's death at the age of just 42. Tributes poured in from far and wide: Newcastle manager Kevin Keegan, Graham Kelly at the FA, Real Madrid's general manager, UEFA, the mayor of Hammersmith and Fulham, the Tate Gallery, Peter Osgood. The list goes on.

So did the football. Chelsea had a game to prepare for, and Eddie Newton, one of Harding's favourite ever players, brings to mind how he felt that week.

Newton: ‘I remember hearing it on the news that apparently his helicopter had crashed. It didn't really sink in because you're still tired from the game. Then the next day, it obviously came out in its entirety. It took everybody aback. We knew that he was a big supporter of the club. Not only that, he was very involved in the club as someone that you meet. I didn't know him totally well, but when you spoke with him, he seemed a genuine guy.

‘He seemed a guy that really wanted the club to go up, and he wanted to be part of that, to push it in the right direction. In life there's always going to be tragedy, unfortunately, but as a professional, you have to keep going. You want the show to go on and people to do well. That's all you try to do, train properly, and be respectful around the circumstances of what was going on, and that's all we could do.’

Frank Sinclair and Steve Clarke also had to come to terms with what had happened.

Clarke: ‘For the next few days, it was difficult to train properly, to work properly, but as professionals, we knew we had to go out and do as well as we could and try and get a result that would be a fitting tribute to Matthew's memory. Fortunately, we were able to do that, but it was a difficult time.’

Sinclair: ‘Everybody had an association with him so it was a tragic time at the football club when he passed away in that accident, and let’s not forget the other people that were on that helicopter as well.

‘You know, if anything, it grew us stronger together. How it affected us, I think it made us stronger as a group, and we went on to do great things that season.’

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By the time the Tottenham game came around, the areas outside the ground resembled a shrine to Harding. Before kick-off, captain Dennis Wise and two of the other longest-serving players, Kevin Hitchcock and Steve Clarke, carried a large wreath onto the pitch and laid it in front of the newly renamed stand. It simply read: Matthew, RIP.

A pint of Guinness, Harding's tipple of choice, was symbolically placed on the centre circle. The ground fell silent, with the Chelsea players stood holding hands, facing the Matthew Harding Stand.

Barry Davies' introduction for that evening's featured game on Match of the Day summed up the sentiment.

‘Myriad thoughts through a minute of silence as Chelsea pay tribute to the man in the boardroom, the millionaire financier from the Shed, a charismatic football lad. As a Chelsea supporter for 34 of his almost 43 years, the visit to Spurs would have been a highlight of the season. After the tragedy which has left five families bereaved, it serves now as a commemoration and a thank you for what Matthew Harding brought to Chelsea Football Club.’

The match itself was dominated by the boys in blue. Gullit, starting his first league game of the season, opened the scoring. And though Tottenham's Chris Armstrong equalized before half-time, goals after the break from David Lee, a penalty, and Roberto Di Matteo, ensured a deserved and emotional home win. Manager and captain delivered their verdict afterwards.

Gullit: ‘The team responded as they wanted to give something back. I was more happy about the winning for him than the winning for Chelsea or for myself. After the match, we had a team talk, and we all wanted to dedicate this victory to Matthew Harding.’

Wise: ‘We just wanted to win the game. It was just a tribute to Matthew from us to show a lot more passion and heart. We just wanted to win for the man. There’s not much I can say, I just feel for his family, and you don't know what to say, really. You just feel for them. We’ve just got to win something now, simple as that. We got to go out and make his dream come true.’

Gullit: ‘We have Matthew Harding always in our hearts. I'm not talking about only the players, but also the fans, the staff, people who work here. He will be with us forever.’

Hutchinson: ‘As Alan Sugar said to me after the match, they never had a chance. The crowd just carried the team through to win 3-1.’

Harding's funeral was held a few days later in Ditchling, Sussex. Representing Chelsea were Bates, Gullit, and Hoddle.

Hoddle: ‘It was a dreadful funeral to go to. It really was. We should never have been going to that funeral at his age and the enthusiasm he had for life. It was very sad.’

Harding's great friend, Francis Maude, remembered him in one of the addresses given that day. This was how his heartfelt tribute concluded:

‘Never look back, Matthew used to say. But we will look back with love and thanks to an extraordinary man. And when we grieve for his going, as we mourn his loss, let's remember him as he was and smile through the tears.’

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Harding's legacy was felt long after his death. His financial investment, somewhere in the region of £26.5 million, was important in elevating Chelsea to the next level on and off the pitch. It was something Bates acknowledged in public.

Bates: ‘Matthew's death doesn't and will not affect our future plans. Such was his devotion to the club that he ensured that his promised financial commitment was totally in place, which is evidenced by the southern complex [at the Shed End], which you can see rising as we speak. It's the next phase of achieving his and indeed all Chelsea fans' dream of having a world-class team and a world-class stadium.’

A little over a year before his death, Harding was part of what would become known as the Marriott Accord, the term given to the Chelsea board meeting held at the prosaic Marriott Hotel in Slough the day after the '95 Cup final.

It was an unlikely setting for one of the most significant days in the club's history, when a decision was made by Bates, Harding, Hutchinson, and Hoddle to start investing significant amounts of money in the team. Gullit was the first big-name signing.

Hoddle: ‘Matthew got as excited as anyone as a fan. He said, “I’m pinching myself, Glenn. Have we got really good Ruud Gullit?!” Yes!’

The touchpaper had been lit. Mark Hughes was the next star to arrive, followed mid-season by Dan Petrescu, and then the trio of internationals who joined in the summer of '96: Gianluca Vialli, Roberto Di Matteo and Frank Leboeuf. Harding's money had proven pivotal in helping transform Chelsea into a club that would soon regularly be challenging for silverware.

Joel: ‘It was a very exciting time. He died shortly after. And that's when we started the success, when we had the FA Cup with Middlesbrough, and from there, we won trophy after trophy. He never really got to see that side of Chelsea, which I think was a shame.’

Glanvill: ‘It was such a shock. There was a sense of truncated fulfilment that with Ruud Gullit in charge, with Matthew Harding investing and being a figurehead for the support, you felt anything was possible.’

Martin Tyler: ‘A Chelsea man, awful thing to happen. The fact that it's still remembered today tells you how much it meant to the followers of Chelsea. I didn't know him personally, but I knew exactly what he stood for. I knew he was Chelsea to the core. It was just a dreadful episode in the history of Chelsea.

‘Sometimes that just binds people together within the dressing room, within the boardroom, and certainly around the ground. You would never want it to happen, but if tragedy does fall, sometimes to the memory of the person who we've lost, it's a wonderful thing. He can't be here to appreciate it, but what would have accrued from that, he would be thrilled with in the sense of the love and the remembrance. It would have brought everybody onto the same page.

‘And the fact that there was a trophy at the end, I know his name was mentioned a lot in the build-up and in the ‘let's do it for Matthew and the family’, and it would have given them some comfort at a terrible time.’

As the commentator Martin Tyler alludes to, the sense of tremendous unity at the club that season played its part in propelling the Blues to FA Cup glory. The players, like Steve Clarke, felt its force.

Clarke: ‘It was a great stimulus for the club. Matthew was a big part of pushing the club forward. We're all very grateful to what he did for us and the help that he gave the club at that time.’

Hoddle: ‘I think he'll always be remembered. And it's fantastic that the stand is always going to make us remember him when you come to Stamford Bridge.’

We will be celebrating Matthew Harding's life and legacy at this weekend's game against Tottenham, with a special video shown on the big screens around 15 minutes before kick-off.