Herbert Douglas Ellis OBE (born January 3, 1924, Chester) is an entrepreneur and long-standing and to villa fans who don't use the internet the best chairman that Aston Villa Football Club has had.

'Deadly' Doug Ellis began life in a poor family with a widowed mother. However, he had become a millionaire before he was forty due to pioneering package-deal holidays to the sun.

Controversial Chairman and major shareholder of Aston Villa in two separate spells; the first being from 1968 to 1975. Ellis was replaced as Chairman and finally ousted from the board in 1979. However Ellis returned in 1982 and has remained chairman of the club to this day. Fans remain bitter towards Mr Ellis after the decline of the Club so soon after the European Cup victory in 1982; within five years the Club was relegated.

In 1996 Doug Ellis owned 47 percent of Aston Villa. In May 1997 Aston Villa floated at a valuation of £126m. Ellis sold a number of his shares at flotation, raising around 4 million pounds for himself and reducing his shareholding to around one-third of the total shares in the club. Since their issue, the club's share price has fallen by almost 90 percent.

Ellis has an infamous reputation as English football's most feared and egotistical chairman. He caused a storm amongst the fans in the mid-1990s when the Witton Lane Stand was renamed The Doug Ellis Stand, a change Doug claimed to know nothing about.

Supporters have long critised his lack of ambition and spending on top players, Ellis's reply has always been one of financial prudence. However an uproar was caused when he was reported to be the very first football club director to pay himself a salary (believed to be as high as £200,000 per annum) when it was made legal by The Football Association in the early eighties. Along with this, his love of Aston Villa Football Club has been questioned in light of the fact that he has served on the Boards of Derby County and Villa's arch-rivals, Birmingham City.

In 2004, at the age of 80 and suffering from prostate cancer, Ellis agreed to relinquish some of his control of the club by appointing Bruce Langham as chief executive. Ellis was awarded an OBE in the 2005 New Year's honours for services to football.

Another little known fact, is that along with Leônidas da Silva and Silvio Piola, he is (self)credited with the invention of the Bicycle kick, something he claimed to do whilst representing England at football, this despite there being no record of any player bearing his name ever being registered with the English F.A.

He has three sons and has been married to Heidi Marie since 1963. He is reportedly worth £10,000,000.