Why Supporter Shareholders are Important for Arsenal

As Ivan Gazidis will face 300 representatives of supporter groups this evening, it seems an appropriate time to post some information about the Arsenal Supporters’ Trust.
The AST gets some flak from certain other Arsenal fans. I realise that these days every viewpoint of every Arsenal fan will get flak from some other Arsenal supporter somewhere, so in that sense I’m not surprised by it, but I think there are misconceptions about why the AST exists.
Of course things have changed since the AST was formed a decade ago. Arsenal’s Board at that time professed to be – and to be fair largely was – all about custodianship, with the emphasis on the fact that three generations of Hill-Woods had been chairmen and three generations of the Bracewell-Smith family were Board members. There were some large shareho...