Eight-two down on aggregate, 12 minutes more to play, thousands of disgruntled fans streaming from the Emirates Stadium. For the first time, I’m among them.

Highbury didn’t die for this. It’s a phrase that became almost a mantra for Alan Davies’s popular podcast – The Tuesday Club – that ended last season, a group of lifelong fans left with nothing new to say about a club determined to bring fresh meaning to the phrase stuck in a rut. It wasn’t always like this.

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22 July 2006. Dennis Bergkamp’s testimonial. The Emirates is packed. Fresh from a narrow loss in the Champions League final to Barcelona, Arsenal, my club, feel as if they on the verge of a breakthrough. In the words of the then managing director, Keith Edelman: “The whole purpose of our move to Emirates Stadium is to develop increased revenues so that they can be invested in the development of the team … It is clearly an important part of what we are trying to achieve and that is to make Arsenal one of the leading clubs in Europe.”

Many thousands of words have been written about what’s gone wrong since, but whether you put that down to the board, the manager, the sudden influx of foreign billionaires – gone wrong it has, leaving me, a season-ticket holder of more than 20 years, sitting in a soulless shell of a stadium, all the joy stripped from the thing that I’ve loved for as long as I can remember.

Arsenal fans have a bad reputation – often deserved – but the idea that we’re a bunch of graceless, ungrateful, passionless cretins is as hard to swallow as any prawn sandwich. Yes, the atmosphere at the Emirates is often dead – but what do you expect when tourists equipped with iPads pack out the ground, there’s a ring of boxes around the stadium making a Kop-like “wall of noise” impossible, and people who spent years next to each other at Highbury have been split asunder?

Of course, the old stadium – so wittily referred to as the Library by opposing fans – wasn’t always as loud as it could be. Show me a Premier League stadium that is. But on a good day, it was great. A crunching Tony Adams tackle. Ian Wright breaking the scoring record. A Thierry Henry goal against Tottenham, again. Glorious memories. It’s an atmosphere the Emirates has rarely come close to, despite 20,000 extra voices. And that isn’t all Highbury had going for it. The fans right on top of the tiny pitch, the marble halls, the tiled bathrooms – every inch of the place screamed history, screamed Arsenal. The new concrete monstrosity might have undergone a fan-advised corporate “Arsenalisation” but it doesn’t come close.

Yes, qualifying for the Champions League year in, year out is some sort of achievement. But it was an achievement Arsène Wenger was managing with ease before the stadium move; finishing in the top four is pretty par for the course if you look back through the club’s history. There might have been bad runs – but there was always a rare joy in that misery. It’s the life of a football fan. And anyway, we knew things would change soon enough. Arsenal have always won trophies, always challenged for league titles.

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Wenger has been an incredible manager, possibly the best in the club’s history, the level of consistency unreplicated anywhere. But to what end? There’s little excitement in qualifying for the Champions League every year when you know, deep down, you have no chance of lifting the trophy. Despite all the promises, Arsenal haven’t looked like serious contenders in 10 years. The persistent failures at the last-16 stage have become dull. Football is about competing. The hope of victory. At Arsenal, that hope is dead. So who benefits? The players through their wages. Stan Kroenke through the influx of cash. Certainly not the supporters. The cost of my season ticket has remained sky high. If the money isn’t going to be used to build a competitive squad I’d rather have it in my back pocket, not swelling the club’s current account, if it’s all right with you, Mr Kroenke.

We were willing to put up with some barren years as stadium debt was repaid on the basis it would lead somewhere good. We were willing to leave our history behind in exchange for silverware. We sold our soul. Any advantage that extra money might have brought has almost been eliminated by the huge rise in TV income, but the purse strings have been loosened, two FA Cups lifted and yet that Faustian pact remains unpaid. We’re less competitive than we were, for sure; however, it’s the feeling that going to the football just isn’t as much fun any more that really chafes. And so I find myself traipsing out of the ground 12 minutes early, being jeered at as a plastic fan by those still in their seats. I’d usually be joining in. Not this time. What’s to be gained by staying? Gallows humour has died a death at the Emirates. Any sense of togetherness ripped apart by years of “Arsène out’ v ‘Arsène knows best”. I can’t stop going – I can’t bring myself to – so what other way is there to register some discontent than leaving an empty seat to watch this latest humiliation?

It won’t achieve the change I want. I know that. But it’s the only thing I can think to do. I want to enjoy going to the ground. I want the songs to echo round the North Bank, to lift my spirits and fire the team on. I want to go back home – but I know we never will. Highbury didn’t die for this.