Fulham captain Tom Cairney insists the club’s first target has to be securing Premier League safety, especially considering their recent history of painful relegations from the top flight.

Speaking to the BBC’s Footballer’s Football Podcast, the midfielder – enjoying an excellent return to Marco Silva’s starting line up of late, said:

“This is the second season out of the Championship, so we can’t get carried away. I remember last season when we were seventh or sixth and people were talking about Europe and we were saying to slow down. This league can bite you if you get ahead of yourselves. If we get anywhere near the points tally of last season, which was Fulham’s second-best ever season in the Premier League, then it will always be a successful season.

I’ve always said staying in the Premier League is the biggest thing. We can’t get ahead of ourselves because we lost our top scorer [Aleksandar Mitrovic] and you can’t look past that really. Staying in the league, getting as close to last season’s tally and take it from there. When I say staying in the Premier League, I don’t mean on the last day of the season, I mean just being an established Premier League team.

You have to look at examples like Brighton, we played them in the Championship in 2017 and they’ve not been down since. You would now consider Brighton an established Premier League club and we have to look at examples like that. In my lifetime, Fulham have always been a Premier League club; mid-table, nice football, always had top players like Dimitar Berbatov and Louis Saha. I don’t mean Europe, I don’t think our fans are that crazy and expect us to get in Europe, but I agree that fans always want more and so do we. Sustaining Premier League status is vital.”