Unai Emery says he is willing to wait a year for William Saliba to arrive because he is "the best solution" to Arsenal's defensive issues.
that Arsenal had won the race to sign Saliba ahead of Tottenham and the 18-year-old centre-back will have a medical at London Colney next week before signing a five year contract with the Gunners.
Though Arsenal have agreed to pay Saint-Etienne £27million for the French centre-back they will also send him back to the Ligue 1 club for a season, a condition of the transfer to the Emirates Stadium.
Emery was believed to favour an immediate move to bring Saliba to the Gunners but is prepared to wait 12 months because he believes the highly-rated defender is the right long-term option.
"Really I am with patience because we want to choose the best solution," Emery said when asked by football.london why he was happy to wait a season for Saliba.
"Some players are very expensive and we are waiting for this possibility. We don't want now to go to the second line of players.
"We are waiting. We have very good players. We have very good young players.
"We are aware also that we need to improve some players in this squad but only, only I want to sign one, two, three or four players only if we can be sure they are coming to improve our team.
"There are a lot of names. The club is working, [technical director] Edu is very close to me and Raul [Sanllehi, head of football]. We speak every day. Here we spoke with the Kroenke family.
"I want to send a message to all our supporters - we're very happy to be here with a lot of Arsenal supporters and are very impressed - we are working and preparing and we want to make the best squad possible. Our ambition and motivation is with all the supporters."
Arsenal are also increasingly optimistic that they will be able to sign Dani Ceballos on loan from Real Madrid with progress expected next week when the Spain Under-21 international returns from holiday. Despite having had two bids rejected from Celtic there is also a confidence that the club can secure left-back Kieran Tierney for around £25m.
