Barry Kilby visibly winced when he was reminded of the old joke: “How do you make a small fortune – you start with a large one and buy a football club.” As chairman of Burnley FC, he knows only too well the perils of putting his money into football. Since he took over at Turf Moor in 1998, he is thought to have ploughed £6 million into keeping the club alive. Editor Andrew Calvert went to meet the man who has just announced a £20 million plan which, he hopes, will see Burnley back in the top drawer of English football.

From the moment he first went through the turnstiles at Turf Moor, Barry Kilby was hooked. He was seven when his Clarets-mad dad took him to see Burnley for the first time.

When he left Clitheroe Royal Grammar School after his A-levels at 18, he signed for the club and spent 18 months playing in the junior teams before realising that he was never going to make the grade.

Instead he made his millions through the launch of what is still the world’s largest media games company, Blackburn-based Europrint. He pioneered the newspaper bingo games of the 1980s on which multi-million-pound circulation wars were fought.

His apprenticeship in business came while he was working in Burnley’s lottery office. He was offered a job by Cambridge Press, selling the scratch cards it printed to football clubs throughout the UK.

After several years on the road, he set up Europrint having come up with the idea of inserting bingo cards into newspapers and printing numbers to encourage sales.

The first newspaper bingo game was played in the Lancashire Evening Telegraph and it wasn’t long before Fleet Street was beating a path to Europrint’s door.

“I knew of a way of scrambling the numbers of the bingo cards on the press,” he recalled. “The Sun and the Daily Mirror were among the first national newspapers to come on board and then it spread to newspapers like Bild in Germany and the New York Post.”

Even the broadsheets wanted part of the action. Rupert Murdoch wanted an upmarket bingo game for The Times and Kilby came up with the Portfolio game, based on the movement of stocks and shares.

“Murdoch sat on the concept for two years, but when it was finally launched in 1984, it doubled The Times’ circulation to 400,000,” he said. That too went on to be an international success with France’s Le Figaro among his many customers.

As he built the Europrint team to around 50 people, the company branched out into promotional cards for supermarkets and devised a series of games for TV stations around the world.

The company entered into a partnership with the giant GTECH corporation to set up Bingovision and the Americans bought an 80 per cent stake in Europrint for £16.8 million in 1998.

That gave Kilby the cash to back his beloved Burnley FC and he took over as chairman that year. In January 1999 he invested £3 million to take a majority holding in the club, which was promoted to The Championship the following year.

“Burnley FC was in trouble at the time,” he recalled. “I looked at the books and I knew I could make a difference. I knew I could move it up the football pyramid.”

Burnley has remained in the second tier of English football since 2000 and Kilby is convinced that the club has consistently punched beyond its weight.

“We have a passionate fan base and achieve crowds of 12,000 from a population of 80,000. Our wage bill has been in the bottom four for years, yet we are competing against clubs with up to five times more resources.”

The £20 million redevelopment of Turf Moor to create a community sports and leisure village is the board’s long-term answer to increasing non match day revenue.

Over the next three years, the ground will be transformed into a modern, all-seated stadium, holding approximately 22,000 fans and encom-passing a whole host of social, leisure and commercial ventures to become a sporting and enterprise hub and breathe new life into the local community.

As a result, the Burnley Sports and Leisure Village will host a new hotel and restaurant complex, a business centre, multi-screen cinema, supporters’ bar and a new retail sports store offering a wide range of sports goods.

In addition, the club plans to invest in a premier Football Academy facility at Gawthorpe to revive its reputation as a youth developing club.

The development is on top of a new business centre, which was already planned for Turf Moor, to encourage start-up businesses and offer help to growing firms.

Kilby said the plan would prove a major catalyst for the regeneration of Burnley. “Burnley is famous for coal, textiles and football,” he said. “We are all the town has got left and, hopefully, we can be part of the regeneration of this town. The town has been declining for many years economically and we believe this is part of the turning point.”

Burnley FC has teamed up with Longside Properties, the company set up by Kilby which bought Turf Moor and Gawthorpe, for the project. The cash will come from club directors, a bank loan, private investment and grants.

The board believes the remodeled ground could bring in additional revenue of up to £3 million a year when it is completed in 2011.

Kilby sold his remaining 20 per cent stake in Europrint in 2003 and concentrates his time on Burnley and two business he has set up which operate from The Old Tannery in Accrington.

One of them, Total Gaming Solutions, takes him back to his roots, selling lottery tickets to football clubs. “In the 1970s they were a major source of income,” he said. “With revenues coming from TV and corporate hospitality, a lot of clubs have lost the art of selling them.”

The business is headed by former BFC chief executive Andrew Watson and has ten clubs on its books, including Derby County, Sheffield Wednesday and Ipswich Town. His other new business is Speedmark, which uses sports events to help schools raise money.

Of retirement, Kilby says: “I have seen a lot of colleagues my age retiring to a holiday home in the sun and they tend to vegetate. I get a big kick out of building businesses and then there is Burnley.”

Can the Clarets do it this season? “I sincerely hope so. Just one season in the Premiership would set us up for the next ten years,” he added.