Ashley’s increased wealth has grown from the small chain of sports shops which he built into SportsDirect.com, the UK’s biggest sportswear retailer, and owner of brands such as like Donnay, Dunlop Slazenger, Kangol, Karrimor and Lonsdale.
His increased wealth has come as he has continued to acquire budget sports brands, such as American extreme sports label No Fear.
Sunderland AFC owner, and newly-appointed chairman, Ellis Short is ranked 15th with a £1bn fortune.
The Missouri-born businessman, who is of Irish descent, built his fortune working for Lone Star Funds, a private equity firm based in Dallas, Texas, as the senior executive responsible for Asian operations.
FourFourTwo's Rich List
1. Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan £20bn
Manchester City (Last year £20bn, 1st)
According to accountants with abacuses, the £23m signing of Samir Nasri took Sheikh Mansour's spending on Manchester City into 10 figures – £1.003 billion, to be precise, breaking down into £210m to acquire the club, £433m on transfers and an aggregate wage bill of £360m. For that he's achieved third place, an FA Cup win and a first Champions League campaign: admission to football's top table.
The Sheikh won't be rooting down the back of the sofa for change. The brother of the ruler of the oil-rich Abu Dhabi, the biggest of the United Arab Emirates, he can afford to take a long view. His family fortune and that of Abu Dhabi as a state have been interlinked since oil was discovered in 1958, turning the nation of fishermen into a global financial powerhouse. The Abu Dhabi assets are reckoned to be nearly £400 billion.
Married to Sheikha Manal bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, daughter of Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, Sheikh Mansour is also politically influential as a member of the federal cabinet in the United Arab Emirates and Minister of Presidential Affairs. His love of sport has already led him to become chairman of Al Jazeera Football Club and the Emirates Horse Racing Authority. With the hefty spending at City and the fact that oil prices are level pegging, we keep Mansour at £20 billion.
2. Alisher Usmanov £12.4bn
Arsenal (Last year £8bn, 3rd)
Uzbek-Russian tycoon Usmanov's Red and White Securities has been buying shares in Arsenal and now has a 29.28% stake worth £235m. He says of his interest in the Gunners: "My love for Arsenal is like that of a man for a woman. It is not something you can sell." But nor can cash consummate the relationship: in April he lost the battle for majority control to Stan Kroenke, to whom Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith and the late Danny Fiszman decided to sell their shares to the American instead of Usmanov.
The son of a former state prosecutor in Tashkent, Usmanov became rich through steel and iron ore mines. He has a 45% stake in Metalloinvest, Russia's biggest iron ore miner, which is valued at up to £13 billion. Usmanov's more recent investments are in media, telecoms and banking. He has made a huge profit on an investment in the £32 billion Facebook social network site. Usmanov bought $800 million of stock in state-controlled Siberbank in 2009. He also owns a £48million mansion in north London, as well as Sutton Place, the Surrey Tudor manor house formerly owned by the world's one-time richest man, J Paul Getty. In September 2007, Usmanov splashed out £20m to buy the art collection of the late cellist Mstislav Rostropovich for a state museum.
With the recent stock market improvements, we raise Usmanov to £13 billion. But despite his large stake in Arsenal and his huge wealth, Usmanov is no nearer gaining control of the club from Stan Kroenke, the US billionaire who has over 66% of the shares.
3. Lakshmi Mittal £11.8bn
QPR (Last year £17bn, 2nd)
You can't always get what you want. Four years after buying into QPR, Mittal will be pleased to see the Hoops playing in the Premier League – but perhaps irked that the attention is on Malaysian majority owner Tony Fernandes, who beat Mittal to the 66% club stake formerly held by F1 supremo Bernie Ecclestone for a rumoured fee of around £35m.
Mittal retains his 33% stake and his son-in-law Amit Bhatia is the QPR vice-chairman. But steel is where Mittal has made his fortune as boss of the world's largest steel maker, ArcelorMittal. He has grown rich by acquiring and turning round ailing ex-state-owned mills round the world. His father, Mohan, had moved to the city after Partition and built up a steel operation. After working in the family business, Mittal moved to Indonesia in 1976 and later in 1995, he separated his own steel operation from the family's Indian businesses, and went his own way.
Mittal settled in London, where he loves to live, although he retains his Indian passport. His family stake in the company is now worth £7.877 billion. Mittal has a £9m pile in London's exclusive Bishop's Avenue, he also set a world record for a private home when he paid a reputed £70m to Bernie Ecclestone for a house in Kensington Palace Gardens. In all with past dividends, and a multi-billion investment portfolio, we reckon that the Mittal family is now worth perhaps £11.8 billion.
4. Roman Abramovich £10.3bn
Chelsea (Last year £7.4bn, 4th)
History is dead to Roman Abramovich. Carlo Ancelotti did the league-and-cup Double for Chelsea in 2010 and within 12 months was sacked in a corridor. His successor Andres Villas-Boas needs to triumph quickly and repeatedly, specifically in the Champions League; in the heretofore fruitless pursuit of winning Europe's biggest club competition, Abramovich has dispensed with managers Ancelotti, Luiz Felipe Scolari, Avram Grant, Jose Mourinho and Claudio Ranieri – and close to £1 billion all told, with losses at the club rising to £77.8 m in 2009-10. Helpfully, Abramovich wrote off £340m of club debt to him in January 2010 and effectively turned a £709m loan into equity.
It's eight years since Abramovich bought Chelsea for £140m but his background was far from privileged. Born in a bleak industrial town just south of the Arctic Circle, he was orphaned at three and raised by his uncle. Moving to Moscow at 14, he did his army service and then started his own business, first making cheap plastic products, later graduating to tyres. Shrewdly he moved into the burgeoning oil industry, buying Sibneft with tycoon Boris Berezovsky in 1995 for around £120m. Abramovich then bought the exiled Berezovsky's shares in Sibneft, which was sold to the Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom in October 2005; the stake held by Abramovich and some minor partners was worth around £7.5 billion, with a further £280m dividend paid in June 2006 to former owners.
Huge dividends over the years from Sibneft and sales of stakes in his other operations added another £2 billion. In recent times, Abramovich has diversified his portfolio by taking a stake in the Russian steel group Evraz and mining group Highland Gold. Abramovich and his partners have stakes in the two now worth £1812m, up sharply on the year. Even after a costly divorce from his former wife Irina, Abramovich has a string of property, art and yachting assets world-wide. With the hefty Chelsea spending, we clip him back by £300m from the £10,600m figure in Finans magazine's 2011 Russian rich list.
5. The Liebherr Family £3bn
Southampton (Last year £3bn, 5th)
Few would have enjoyed Southampton's recent successes more than Markus Liebherr (pictured). The industrialist died of a heart attack in August 2010, just 13 months after agreeing a deal to buy the then struggling Saints within two hours of arriving at the St Mary's ground. No terms were disclosed but the club came out of administration and Liebherr claimed the deal was "ein Schnappchen" (a bargain).
Scion of the Liebherr family, whose self-named industrial group has expanded over the decades from tower cranes into all manner of machinery, Markus inherited a fifth of the family fortune when his father died in 1993 – but gave his shares back and developed his own business group Mali International. The whole Liebherr fortune is reckoned to be worth £3 billion.
His family have pledged to continue his good work at Southampton. Generously funded, the Saints had finished 2009/10 in a disappointing seventh place in League One, but were promoted the following season; they have started 2011/2012 strongly despite the sale of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain to Arsenal for £12m – a fee which took Southampton's income from the transfer of academy players like Wayne Bridge, Theo Walcott and Gareth Bale to more than £40m since the turn of the century.
6. Joe Lewis £2.8bn
Tottenham Hotspur (Last year £2.7bn, 6th)
Eye-catching adventures in Europe are nothing new to Joe Lewis, Spurs' ultimate owner with a £117m stake. Having made his early fortune in foreign-exchange dealing (and relocated to the Bahamas in the 1970s), he made a packet when Britain left the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. He recycles the forex profits into his Tavistock Group with interests in 175 companies in areas including property, financial services, life sciences, energy, industry and consumer goods. It also has significant holdings in Russian oil and gas. Among Lewis's property holdings are 3,600 acres in the Bahamas, 8,000 acres in Florida and a 50,000-acre ranch in Argentina – so it must have been particularly annoying when Spurs missed out on the prime real estate of London's new Olympic Stadium, which has been promised instead to West Ham United.
Lewis has had his bad times – in March 2008 he lost nearly £500m on his investment in failed Wall Street bank Bear Stearns – but that hardly dented the Lewis fortune: the share purchases were not made with borrowed money but came straight from Lewis's deep pockets. He also has a £250m stake in the pubs group, Mitchells & Butler, and is trying to gain control of the company. He's helped by sales of business assets well before the Bear Sterns collapse – such as the CovX pharmaceuticals company to Pfizer – and continued huge annual profits on foreign exchange deals. Safe to say he won't need to go InterRailing round Europe any time soon.
7. Denis O'Brien £2.517bn
Celtic (Last year £1.87bn, 7th)
Although no longer a director of Doncaster Rovers since the Yorkshire club was reorganised under the company name Patienceform (see entries 24, 59 and 82), Irish entrepreneur Denis O'Brien now has a 2.82% stake in Celtic.
Obviously, football hasn't made him rich: that would be his wise moves in the telecoms industry. He started by winning a local radio licence in 1989 for Dublin; two years later he established Esat Telecom, which became the first company to compete against former state-owned telephone company Eircom.
He also established Esat Digifone and won Ireland's second GSM license, to compete against the then state-owned telephone company's mobile section, Eircell. In 2000 O'Brien sold Esat Telecom to BT for $2.9 billion, collecting £175m for his stake. He then launched Digicel, a Caribbean-based mobile company now worth £1.6 billion after debt. That dwarfs his £1m stake in Celtic, as do other assets including the £36m Quinta do Largo golf resort in Portugal and a 21.6% stake in Irish News & Media.
8. Stanley Kroenke £1.8bn
Arsenal (Last year £1.85bn, 8th)
It can't be easy to be seen as the lesser of two evils, but a good businessman will welcome whatever opens doors for him. Although Arsenal hadn't invited the interest in a full takeover bid, Kroenke and Alisher Usmanov had been independently gathering minority shares as they jostled for position; the board preferred the American's advances, and the late Danny Fiszman and Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith sold their shares to Kroenke, whose 66% stake is worth around £530m.
Born in Columbia, Missouri – where he still resides – Enos Stanley Kroenke married one of the US's richest women. With her sister Nancy, Ann Walton inherited stock from her father James, who (with his brother Sam) founded WalMart – now the world's biggest supermarket group. Kroenke built his own fortune developing commercial and retail properties, many not far from WalMart stores.
A sports nut, he owns pro basketball's Denver Nuggets and hockey's Colorado Avalanche; both play at his Pepsi Center. He also owns a stake in pro football's St. Louis Rams. His assets also include five ranches covering 1.5m acres, shopping centres and office properties. Forbes' 2011 list of America's richest pegs him at £1.6 billion, but we raise him to £1.8 billion.
9. Malcolm Glazer & family £1.64bn
Manchester United (Last year £1.53bn, 9th)
The Glazers will never win any popularity contests among Manchester United fans. Having come under fire after borrowing heavily to take the club into private ownership, they were then criticised for considering a £600m flotation on the Singapore stock exchange. That idea was put on hold due to stock market volatility but the club's bottom line looks healthy: in the year to June 2011 turnover rose 15.7% to £331.4m, while operating profits reached an all-time high of £110.8m due to commercial revenues smashing through the £100m barrier for the first time thanks to a string of lucrative sponsorship deals. The accounts for Red Football, the club’s parent company, also showed its net debt fell from £377m to £308m.
Whatever the figures – helped along the way, fans argue, by rising ticket prices – the Glazers remain the most hated owners in British football. Patriarch Malcolm Glazer, who inherited his father's jewellery busienss, also owns NFL franchise the Tampa Bay Buccaneers; other assets include investments in food, marine protein, broadcasting, health care, property, banking, natural gas, oil and the internet. Whatever dividends he reaps, they don't include the love of the Red Devils faithful.
10. Mike Ashley £1.37bn
Newcastle United (Last year £950m, 16th)
You can get a passable football outfit at Sports Direct for very little outlay; it's tempting to say the retailer's founder Mike Ashley is managing the same trick at Newcastle United, who have started the Premier League season strongly despite selling their four best players during 2011.
Ashley's relationship with Magpies fans is best described as volatile. Having gradually bought the club whole over summer 2007 he was initially welcomed as a hero, swigging lager with the lads while wearing the famous black and white stripes and replacing the unpopular manager Sam Allardyce with local legend Kevin Keegan in January 2008. But Keegan resigned that September over transfer policy and the fans turned against the board, leading to Ashley offering to sell the club. He still hasn't found a buyer at the right price, having paid £134m and put in £258m all told, although fans are more likely to quote the £35m the club received in January for star striker Andy Carroll, who still hasn't been replaced.
Money is not an issue for Ashley, especially compared to the privacy he has protected so fanatically before his sudden appearance under the floodlights. Once described as Britain's Howard Hughes, Buckinghamshire-born Ashley is thought to live in seclusion in Hertfordshire. What we do know is that the former squash coach opened a small chain of sports shops which he built into Sports Direct, now the UK's largest sportswear retailer, partly by taking his chances to buy brands like Donnay, Dunlop Slazenger, Kangol, Karrimor and Lonsdale. In February 2007 Sports Direct floated for £2.2bn, pocketing £929m in one day for Ashley, who retained control; shares dropped sharply but are recovering and the company is now worth nearly £1.3 billion with Ashley sitting on a £916m stake. His Newcastle United holding, past property deals, dividends, salaries and cash take him sailing into the billionaires' club.