On matchdays, they travel by the thousands on London Underground's Piccadilly Line to Islington's N5. They've come not just from the surrounding streets and boroughs but also from the world over. Arsenal Football Club is a world brand—global, fashionable, chic. Represented among the crowd are football tourists from a hundred countries. Some of them are in London solely to quench their lavish tastes by spending 90 minutes inside what is one of the world's iconic stadiums.

Arsenal appeals, and Emirates Stadium is the jewel in the crown of this glam, cosmopolitan institution. Ten years after it rose up to replace famous Highbury Stadium as the home of the Gunners, this shimmering concrete and glass arena at Ashburton Grove satisfies football's vast corporate potential whilst constantly setting the bar higher—an incubator for the commercial pulse of the game. If the art deco terraces of Highbury are the ghost of football past, then the Emirates resoundingly represents its future: refined, rich and increasingly exclusive.

Exclusivity, though, leaves out the excluded.

"I haven't been in the ground all season," says Kelvin Meadows, season-ticket holder of 30 years and co-founder of protest group the Black Scarf Movement. "I think I went in twice last season. Next match, I'll be there, but I won't be in the ground. I'll be next door in the pub."

For Meadows, Arsenal is not an accessory to be flaunted but a lifestyle choice—one played out across four decades of following the club through some irreversible alterations. Recently, though, that's changed.

"There are people who have been going down there for 30, 40 years," he says, "but now that the club has all this Premier League money, they don't care about what we have to say, because there's always someone who'll want your seat."

The move to the Emirates in 2006 wasn't the first time Arsenal underwent a seismic physical change that transformed the matchday experience. Matthew Bazell is another lifelong Gooner who no longer recognises the club he grew up supporting—a sentiment manifested in his book Theatre of Silence: The Lost Soul of Football, which mourns a change in English football culture.

Bazell was one of two Arsenal supporters in a Football Supporters' Federation delegation that met with Premier League chief Richard Scudamore at league headquarters in August 2014 about rising matchday costs. He's also another of the faithful to have turned his back on the Emirates, but he traces the decline much further into the club's history.

"The atmosphere at Highbury never ever recovered from the old North Bank being knocked down in 1991," he says, though the demolition was actually in 1992. "After that was the first time I'd noticed that games were quiet. I'd definitely never noticed before then. But it isn't just me that feels this way. I know guys covered head to toe in Arsenal tattoos who could tell you everything about the club history and for whom Arsenal is their life, but they don't go anymore. They feel culturally isolated."

Arsenal fans arrive at Highbury in November 1934 to watch their team play Aston Villa.

And this is where Arsenal history begins to dovetail with a global transformation in football's genes. Bazell talks about a coup d'etat by the rich at Arsenal—the appropriation of a football club that was built by the working classes and its transformation into a plaything of the wealthy.

At the back of this trend lies a difficult truth that poses serious repercussions for the future of football in this part of the city.

The gentrification of London's boroughs is an animal assuming many forms. It has transformed neighbourhoods, changed demographics and hiked the value of the land in which the very seeds of the city are sowed. London today has become needy, with its multifarious culture being sold off to the highest bidder. Here, everything has its price. And the price is ever rising.

The heartlands from which Arsenal have traditionally drawn their fanbase have been hard hit by these waves of change. In response to this, and to a raft of other alterations wrought by the long evolution of English football, the club has rolled out some changes. Today, the Emirates boasts England's most expensive season ticket at £2,013, whilst admission for a single matchday can top £97.

Football in Britain is pegged to the country's industrial past. The clubs of the Premier League owe their heritage to groups of workers who got together to play after downing tools for the day—the railwaymen of Newton Heath who laid the foundation for Manchester United, the world's most profitable club, or the workers at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich who became the Football League's first southern members in 1893.

More than any club in England, Arsenal continues to bear its heritage on its badge and in its name, but in hyper-rich London, that is where the lineage trail goes cold. Once, the team shared a background with its local, working-class fans. In the new millennium, it's all changed.

As Meadows notes, every vacated seat inside one of the world's most fashionable stadiums has no shortage of takers. The Premier League and its blanket global coverage have created a new breed of football tourist ready to travel halfway around the world for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to watch Arsenal in the flesh. It's the same kind of fan who is happy to fork out for the full matchday experience at the "home of football," which includes taking in the club shop and one or more of the plentifully stocked food and drink outlets.

In short, every seat occupied by a stalwart Gooner of a decade or more—rather than a starry-eyed Emirates first-timer—costs the club money.

It's important to think hard before distributing blame for the new trend. It's hard to think that it's the new breed of cosmopolitan football fan at fault.

"If I was going across to New York to see Arsenal play in a pre-season friendly, once I've travelled all that way, it wouldn't bother me to pay £100 for a ticket," Meadows says. "And that's what we've got here now. Tourists come to London for the weekend, and they want to see the Arsenal play, so they don't care about having to pay all that money. It's a once-in-a-lifetime experience. So the club earns more money out of the one-game-a-season supporter."

It's not a wonder that the relationship between the club and its local fans is changing.

Arsenal fans protest ticket prices at their Premier League match against Liverpool at the Emirates in April 2015.

The BSM has tried to have a dialogue with Arsenal. Representatives found a way into the club's supporters' Christmas party in 2012 and confronted chief executive Ivan Gazidis. His response was symptomatic of the crossed wires that seem to define relations between the hierarchy and the grassroots in the Emirates age.

"I'm going to find it very difficult to be seen talking to a group when there's a couple of thousand of you outside the ground singing 'What the f--k do you do?' at the board," Meadows recalls the South African saying.

"But we didn't start that," Meadows says. "That's what the supporters were thinking. All we are is a conduit for their anger."

Protests began back in 2009, before a home match against Aston Villa. Meadows says the police estimated between 800 and 1,000 people attended a march that began on Blackstock Road and paraded through the borough, past the corpse of Highbury, which now stands as lush private flats, and on to the Drake Arms pub, where they received resounding support from travelling Villa fans.

The purpose of the march was to protest ticket prices, which had recently been inflated by 6 per cent—a problem that cuts across the Premier League but is at its most acute in north London. A protest in October 2012, however, got to the core of how Meadows and his peers feel the club have cut them loose.

At the 2012 annual general meeting, attended by both large and small shareholders, then-club chairman Peter Hill-Wood batted away a question from the floor about whether the board would make changes to its ageing, all-male makeup.

"Thank you for your interest in our affairs," he said, according to the BBC, and brought the meeting to a sharp close.

The result was a 2,000-strong march against the board and its handling of the club's finances and general affairs. The BSM hasn't held a public protest since, with Meadows believing that its purpose of raising awareness and rallying action has been served, but Hill-Wood's words have left an acrid taste that remains with the club's fans.

One of those fans is Tim Payton, spokesperson for the Arsenal Supporters' Trust.

"Arsenal is too important to be owned by any one person," he says. "At Arsenal in the past, we had many more shareholders than we do now. All right, we weren't what you'd call a fully supporter-owned club, but the model was much more plural 10 years ago. It isn't 'our' affairs they should be talking about. A football club should be inclusive of its stakeholders."

Three watershed moments hit Arsenal in the 2006-07 season, and the move to the new ground was only the most visible. It was, poignantly, the first year in which every member of the squad was an Arsene Wenger signing, following the retirement of Dennis Bergkamp in the summer of 2006.

It represented a symbolic departure from the past, with all footballing links between the Wenger era and the Arsenal of George Graham severed, but it also meant something more tangible. Even as late in Wenger's reign as 2004 and the Invincibles, there were still three giants of "old" Arsenal lining up in the team.

Although Bergkamp, Martin Keown and Ray Parlour were no longer regular starters, they maintained a huge presence around the club. They were the thread that joined the present with the past—a constant whilst the club flip-flopped through heavy changes. The loss of that constant was felt.

The other change was the departure after 24 years of vice-chairman David Dein in April 2007. The club has never given a formal reason why Dein turned up for work one day only to be escorted from the premises by team security, and the conduit he provided between Wenger and the board has never been replaced.

Dein had a way of taking the manager's ideas to the board and making it think it had come up with them, and vice versa. He was also the active agent in transfer negotiations, working from lists drawn up by Wenger and his vast network of scouts. But, most of all, Dein's departure affected the way the club's ownership interacted with its fans.

"It used to be that I could just call up David Dein, who owned 30 per cent of the club," Payton says of the AST's new relationship with the hierarchy. "It's a very different relationship now to, say, call up someone who might be called the communications director who just reports in to someone else. The relationship now is much more like a consumer forum, discussing with executives at the club about fairly low-level decisions, rather than having discussions with owner-directors who are also supporters. It's much more of a 'them and us' relationship, much more consumer-based."

Meadows also sees the loss of Dein as a crucial moment in the club's evolution.

"When Dein went, Wenger lost a great ally," he says. "Now it's just Wenger and the board, and nobody on that board knows football. David Dein, on the other hand, had sat on all kinds of football committees, and he knew the game. He was a football man."

Artwork by Virgo Araaf for B/R

But it's not just the losses of Dein, Bergkamp and others that have altered the DNA of the place. In February 2015, the club made a deliberate uncoupling within the current ownership model when it formally ceased its backing for the AST's fanshare scheme.

The scheme, which launched around the time of the stadium move, at one time had resulted in almost 2,000 fans becoming involved in a £2m collective share of ownership in the club by supporters, Payton says. The club's subsequent withdrawal of support for Arsenal Fanshare Society Limited formalised the watering-down process, and now a very small number of supporters are left owning only 0.2 per cent of the club, according to the scheme's website.

Arsenal's website reports that KSE, majority shareholder Stan Kroenke's company, owns just over 67 per cent of the shares, and Alisher Usmanov's company, Red and White Holdings, has another 30 per cent, leaving not quite 3 per cent of all shares available to anyone else and making it all but impossible for the scheme to acquire sufficient shares to become self-financing.

"The Fanshare Board tried on numerous occasions to persuade Arsenal's Board to continue to support the Scheme," AST said in a statement in February 2015, "but to no avail."

Bazell, Meadows and Payton echo the idea that a football club is comprised of what happens off the pitch. Fortunes come and go, likewise players and managers, but some things must be consistent in order for a club to survive.

Another departure from the past that occurred during the first decade of the new millennium was the changing of the Arsenal badge following the double win in 2002, and whilst the club insists that fan groups were consulted over the matter, no formal fan organisation has owned up to having been involved. According to Bazell, the change boiled down to "stupidity and money."

In the new badge—introduced because parts of the previous design could not be copyrighted, meaning the club was losing out on income from the sale of counterfeit merchandise—the club's historic motto, "Victoria Concordia Crescit" (roughly "victory grows out of harmony"), was removed. According to Design Week's Hannah Booth, the words were dismissed by 20/20, the London-based design consultancy who drew up the crest, as "some irrelevant Latin text," a knife through the heart of the fans who see less and less remaining of the club they fell in love with.

Amidst it all, the new ground continues to haemorrhage hardcore supporters, and the atmosphere they generated subsides into something sallow and heavy.

"The atmosphere changed in [1992], but the personnel inside the ground began to change from about '98," says Bazell, recalling memories of Highbury's internal makeup, which maximised the atmosphere by localising different kinds of supporters.

The ends of the North Bank were for "civilised" fans, in his words, with the middle and upper part of the old stand for a more vocal atmosphere and singing. If you wanted to provoke the away fans, you would go down to the Clock End; if you wanted to sit quietly and watch the match, you went to the East or West Stands.

Fans would pick their culture and locate accordingly to that part of the ground. It created a patchwork effect, which came together not by the designs of men in suits or architects in plush offices but by natural forces, as supporters of common mind collected to multiply their influence around Highbury's modest terraces.

The century-old process had been one of unforced harmony. It incubated what over a hundred years became the essence of Arsenal. But now the ground is disparate; there is no focal point.

Arsenal players say goodbye to the original Clock End in May 2006, after beating Wigan in the last game played at Highbury.

"Sitting in a quiet football stadium drains the soul," Bazell says, "and that's why I stopped going. It's why thousands of us have stopped going."

Says Payton: "Arsene Wenger has said in the past that the team needs noise to perform at its best; it needs the fans behind it. Well, you can't have it both ways."

Even the very bricks and mortar that hold up the new stadium are cause for disquiet in some corners. There was no more recognisable ground in the football world than uniquely stylish Highbury, with its art deco finish and unmistakable marble halls (which were actually built from terrazzo).

"The new one's just a load of glass," Bazell says of the place he rarely visits. "Doesn't match up at all. The art deco design could have been incorporated in some way to have kept that uniqueness that set Arsenal apart."

The consensus seems to be that you cannot systematically dismantle the culture that made the stadium tick—made the club tick—and still expect to have the same fire in the stands, be they seated or terraced.

The change of fanbase is a phenomenon that has cut across the Premier League—across English football. Just as Italia '90 altered perceptions of the domestic game at the time of the Taylor Report, Euro '96 made English football newly fashionable, reviving inclinations among young families and wealthy spectators to invest their time and money in matchdays.

Fully 10 years before a ball was kicked at Emirates Stadium, these forces were at work, and irreversible changes were underway. In this sense, the new ground didn't cause seismic change. It is simply an expression of it, and the new Arsenal a symptom.

Price hikes worked in harmony with a new demographic, feeding off and fuelling the potential for clubs to charge more to enter renovated, comfortable stadiums. But is this really the coup d'etat that Bazell fears has taken his club away?

"From 1998 onwards, Arsenal became very fashionable," Bazell says. "Before that, it was very much a working-class club. This was a club built by the working class, by workers in the old Woolwich gun factory, and it's been stolen by the rich. But football changes the way life changes. If you go around Finsbury Park now, around Crouch End and around Islington and Harringay and Camden, around these traditional Arsenal areas, the working class and middle class there are being marginalised. Now the Arsenal strongholds are in Golders Green, Highgate and Hampstead. Rich areas.

"You can't blame the club for that. You can blame the club for a lot of things, but you can't blame them for the way the area has changed."

As the game is boxed up in glossy TV packages and beamed around the world, it's easy to forget that Premier League clubs still have a relationship with the communities they live in. The building of the Emirates in 2006 may have meant increased access for the 20,000-plus fans ready and willing to dig that bit deeper on matchdays, but for others, the reality of a new football stadium rising from the remains of what used to be a waste treatment plant posed changes to their way of life.

A fan pictured outside the Emirates before Arsenal vs. Bayern Munich in October 2015.

Gill Shepherd heads up the Highbury Community Association. She makes some stark reflections on the way the club has chosen to live side by side with its neighbours in the borough.

"The club have shown that they're ready and willing to spend a lot of money on players but not so much on upholding their end of the legal deals that were done on the stadium," she says from her Islington home.

Steve Hitchins, the leader of Islington Council at the time, said in 2006 that the club would provide "amazing community benefits, revitalising the whole area." Some of those benefits have failed to materialise. They included several new doctors' surgeries that remain to be built.

There were also to be parking facilities beneath the stadium to ease the burden on local streets on matchdays. These facilities are rarely if ever used, the club citing police security concerns, as coaches continue to clog pedestrian streets during home games.

Escalators—paid for by the club—were supposed to have been installed at Holloway Road underground station to ease congestion on matchdays. This has never happened, so now Holloway Road remains closed when Arsenal play at home.

Many of the "affordable" homes put up by the club were rooming houses with shared facilities rather than private accommodations—and according to a 2006 Evening Standard story by Andrew Gilligan, just 7 per cent of the flats in the complex that replaced Highbury were classed by the government as affordable.

The most damning part of Arsenal's relationship with the neighbourhood during the build was the five Islington Council planning officers paid for by the club.

Arsenal ponied up for the salaries of the five, who went on to be responsible for making decisions on the club's planning applications.

"There's a word for that I think," Shepherd says. "Bribery."

Under this arrangement, the council became what the Evening Standard's Gilligan described as the club's "land acquisition agent, seizing other local businesses under the council's compulsory purchase powers in order to pass their land to the club."

Many of the properties the club built at nearby Queensland Road as part of the contract have been sold off to absentee owners from overseas, Shepherd says, exacerbating a London-wide problem in which acres of livable accommodation stand empty.

"We have a problem all over London with excessively high property prices, and doing it this way [selling to absentee owners] really hasn't helped matters," she says.

The small amount of social housing built by the club has been segregated from the rest, which Shepherd believes has led to unnecessary friction in the area.

"There's this constant feeling that if you don't make the running, then Islington Council aren't going to either," she says. "The only way the local community associations can put on a bit of leverage is by making a hell of a fuss."

At the back of it all, it's important to remember that Arsenal is a business with a mandate to maximise its profitability, not to make concessions to a community with which its relationship has become little more than an inconvenience for both parties. But perhaps this shows us more than anything how far the club has drifted from the ethic upon which it was built.

It's a reality that bears only so much analysis; football has changed, from top to bottom. When people have paid £65 and up for a seat, their expectations are different from when they paid a few pounds to stand in a crowd that roared and rocked. Now they're not so much supporters as an audience, not fans but customers, and they expect to be entertained.

Is the solution to rip out 15,000 seats at the Clock End, install safe-standing rails and wait for the Taylor Report legislation to change, as proposed by Alan Davies on his Arsenal podcast The Tuesday Club? Is there an answer in trying to pack out that end of the ground with people who live in Islington, young people from the local streets, who have paid only £15 to get in the ground?

It's unlikely, since there seems to be no will to change among the people who call the shots, neither in N5 nor anywhere else around the Premier League.

All photos courtesy of Getty Images. Editor's note: Information regarding the regeneration project has been updated since the article was originally published to revise incorrect statements about what has not yet been accomplished from the original plans.