Unai Emery warned he must get Arsenal back into the Champions League | OneFootball

Unai Emery has been tasked with getting Arsenal back into the Champions League at the earliest opportunity.

The Gunners have failed to qualify for Europe’s premier club competition in both of the last two seasons and currently sit 5th in the Premier League table.

But it seems Emery – who succeeded Arsène Wenger in the Emirates Stadium hot-seat this summer – could well find himself under significant pressure if his side finishes outside the top four this season.

“It is not going to be easy but I absolutely, 100 per cent believe Arsenal Football Club can get back to where it needs to get,” said Arsenal managing director Vinai Venkatesham.

“The first step we need to do is get back into the Champions League and then we need to start competing and then we need to start winning the biggest trophies in the game.

“We need to be realistic, last season we finished sixth and we had our second season in a row in the Europa League – that is not where we want this football club to be.

“I think it has an impact across the club – it is a material impact, financially, being in the Europa League and not the Champions League.

“It is hard to put a number on it because it depends how well you do in the Europa League and how well you do in the Champions League and it depends on how many English clubs are in both.

“But it is tens of millions of pounds, it is a material impact being in the Europa League – so that is the financial bit of it.”

The longer Arsenal stay out of the Champions League, the bigger the risk there is of Arsenal falling behind Europe’s elite clubs in financial terms.

However, Venkatesham insists there is no need for the club’s supporters to be concerned.

“We do have a self-sustaining business model so the more years you spend out of the Champions League the bigger strain it puts on the business model,” he said.

“There’s not a final point we get to where it becomes a catastrophic problem and we are nowhere near that.

“We run the business in a responsible way – we know there are at least six teams who have a minimum requirement of being in the Champions League.

“So we have that robustness built into our business model that we can have some seasons in the Europa League and still make the investments we need.”

Arsenal are currently three points behind north London rivals Tottenham in the race for top four. On Sunday, they travel to face Bournemouth in the Premier League, where they will be hoping to pick up their first league win since 22 October.