Arsenal must win the Champions League to be seen as "a truly great club", chief executive Ivan Gazidis has admitted.

Gazidis believes however the club's young stars can go one better than in 2005 and are in with a real chance of being crowned champions of Europe this season.

He said: "We have to have that as our ambition. Winning the Champions League, along with winning the Premiership, has to be our primary ambition and to be a truly great club at the this level you have to be competing to win the Champions League.

"We have a very young squad and we are asking a lot of them to compete at this kind of level but they have proven this year they can beat everybody and we believe we have a real chance to win the Champions League this year."

The ownership of Arsenal remains a thorny issue for the club with the largest single shareholder, Alisher Usmanov who has 25 per cent of the shares through his company Red and White Holdings, not even on the board of directors.

Gazidis said the board members need to get to know the business tycoon from Uzbekistan better - as they had with American billionaire Stan Kroenke who was invited onto the board in September.

"I am not saying Mr Usmanov can never be on the board, nor that he will be on the board, I just don't know how it will resolve itself," said Gazidis.

"We have a board that is very focused on the traditions of the club and running it on a self-sustaining basis. I don't believe that the board wants to have the club run in a different way so anyone that comes onto the board needs to be a part of the team.

"Our board have said they would like to get to know Mr Usmanov better, just as they got to know Mr Kroenke better, and to understand his philosophies better before making a decision whether to invite him onto the board or not."

Gazidis said Usmanov was gradually becoming known to the directors.

He added: "He attends games - he was in Rome and was very cordial with a number of our board members and is regularly in our directors box and mingling with other members of the board. The relationship is cordial, it's not confrontational, and there is a process that is on-going of getting to know him better."

Meanwhile, Gazidis said Arsenal would not be tempted to join Manchester United and Chelsea in embarking on lucrative pre-season tours to Asia or the USA. Arsenal instead will go on their usual trip to Austria before returning for a pre-season tournament at the Emirates.

He said: "Our manager has to be given the tools he needs to prepare the team in the best possible way for them to be competitive according to his system and that involves a relatively quiet pre-season.

"I would rather forego some commercial revenue in order to make sure we are successful as we can be on the pitch.

"That's not to say that clubs that go overseas are wrong and we are right, it's simply our method of preparation."