York departed its 88-year home Bootham Crescent for the LNER Community Stadium last year and, after years of delays, the move has been plagued by numerous issues, primarily through ticketing, run by the City-owned York Stadium Management Company (SMC).

Such frustrations over tickets as well as a lack of bar facilities were aired by supporters at Monday evening’s fans’ forum with Henderson highlighting what he described as the poor design of the ground, which is owned by City of York Council.

Addressing the lack of a social club-style venue for fans, Henderson said: “The (Supporters’) Trust does potentially have the opportunity of looking at something outside the stadium on that.

“As far as inside the stadium, we were looking at the LNER Lounge, but we could only open it after matches.

“For the money it would take to keep it open, we wouldn’t create any money.

“The stadium is built wrong. Everybody who comes to the games knows that.

“Everyone sees what happens at half time (with queuing). It’s going to take a lot of effort and meetings and banging down doors to try and get what you guys are asking for.

“We’re going to try, because we want a much better experience for the fans.

“Our job is to sift through every contract and find out where we are from there in terms of what we can and can’t do.”

While not taking questions formally at the forum, Mike Brown, the chair of the Trust, which owns 49 per cent of the club, with Henderson holding the remaining 51 per cent, briefly voiced his similar gripes.

Brown said: “When the Council laid out plans to build this place, they actively pushed out the Trust and didn’t have a proper public consultation at all.

“It was somewhat inevitable that fans weren’t going to get the experience that they wanted. That’s of no surprise.

“A year ago, the Trust announced initial plans to open a 365-days-a-year bar around the vicinity of the Stadium.

“That is progressing and there’s still work going into that.”

Henderson addressed the issues surrounding the SMC, whose ticketing system fans have had several struggles dealing with since the Stadium opened.

“The way the SMC was set up, the previous regime wanted to own it but no one knew how to run it,” he said.

“They didn’t realise what a big undertaking it was. They had a lot of issues and have since changed everything and there’s some really good people running the show there right now.

“There are still some issues that we’re going to have to look at and we talk about those every day.”

A recurring theme of the forum was Henderson’s explanation of the multiple parties involved in the running of the Stadium, including the Council, York City, York City Knights, GLL, the SMC and a separate catering company.

“One of the biggest problems we have is the number of contracts that are linked together,” the chairman said.

“As this process has gone on to build this stadium, everything has been intertwined.

The majority shareholder, who succeeded ex-chairman Jason McGill in July, added: “For the last month, we’ve been piecing together what we can do and what’s the best way to move forward.”

City of York Council was approached for comment.