FOREIGN owners of football clubs generally tend to be about as popular as politicians, estate agents and the plague. Manchester United fans briefly protested with green and yellow Newton Heath scarves when Malcolm Glazer took control of the club in 2005 and immediately saddled it with £550m of fresh debt. Likewise, Stan Kroenke, who now owns £97.06% of Arsenal, is condemned for pocketing the fruits of the club’s serial Champions League qualification and perhaps more importantly never forcing Arsene Wenger to sign a decent centre half. Vincent Tan, Malky Mackay’s nemesis-in-chief, was always an acquired taste in Cardiff over his plan to change the club’s colours and crest while Venky’s, an Indian conglomerate who focus mainly on the poultry sector, at some points appeared to be playing chicken with the very future of Blackburn Rovers.

But if ever there was a foreign owner out there who did manage to buck the trend and crack it, it was the late Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha of Leicester City. Sure, the man who perished in a helicopter crash last weekend along with two members of his staff, the pilot and a passenger, made megabucks on the back of the £39m he spent to buy out Milan Mandaric in charge of the ailing midlands side in 2010. At the last estimate, the club was thought to be worth easily ten times that.

And of course, success on the park has always been a shortcut to buy your way into the supporters’ affections. Chelsea were a middling club until Roman Abramovich’s roubles transformed their fortunes, while Sheikh Mansour has bankrolled a Manchester City dynasty, and built an entire sports precinct in a previously run-down area of the city.

The business Srivaddhanaprabha started up in a modest duty-free shop in downtown Bangkok in 1989 had the good fortune to acquire a near-monopoly in the country’s major airports for his King Power brand just as the Chinese tourist boom was taking off. But he trump the rest of those by managing to deliver success on a budget, with no shortage of loose change for the local community.

Winning promotion back into the Barclays Premier League was one thing, but defying odds of 5,000-1 to take the Foxes all the way to the first top division title in their history is something of a different order entirely.

For only a modest increase in the ticket price upon promotion back to the big time in 2014, a promise was made that £180m of a personal wealth estimated at £1.9bn would be spent to reach the top five within three years. Much rolling of eyes later, with only a third of the money spent, the title was theirs, a fleet of 19 BMW supercars in the club’s colours mysteriously turning up at training one day to reward the players who made it happen. Having left for Chelsea, N’Golo Kante never got his, but for him, as much as other elite talents assembled on cut price deals like Riyad Mahrez and Jamie Vardy, Leicester and Srivaddhanaprabha was the making of them.

As much as he arrived and left in that same blue helicopter every match day, VIchai was not one for grandstanding in the media. Sometimes, there was free beer and donuts for supporters at the stadium, subsided supporter buses to away matches, or an act of kindness for someone in need.

“It’s the Thai culture,” said his son and club vice-chairman, Aiyawatt, a few years back. “We give our time to the staff, the players and to the manager. We try to manage it like a family, to listen to the problems of every single member of staff.”

Having been respectful to the club’s culture, the players had little problem reciprocating when it came to small acts such as halting training and observing a minute’s silence in memory of King Bhumobol Adulyadej, whose 70-year reign in the country ended with his death shortly earlier, or posing for a picture with a framed photo of the monarch. The moral of the story, if there is one? That a foreign owner might just be the best thing that ever happens to your local team. Poignantly, Srivaddhanaprabha had even flown Buddhist monks to the country to bless the players and the stadium, where that helicopter left for its last short, fateful journey at the weekend.