Kieran Tierney will stay at Arsenal for the final six months of his contract to be part of a Premier League title push, before returning to Celtic in the summer.

Tierney has agreed a pre-contract and will be back at Parkhead on a four-year deal from next season, although Brendan Rodgers was also hoping to have him on loan for the rest of the season before the switch.

But Arsenal have made it clear that Tierney is staying in Arteta’s squad for the rest of the campaign as they try to close the six-point deficit on leaders Liverpool in the title race, while also playing in the Champions League knockout stages.

Arteta has Riccardo Califiori and Myles Lewis-Skelly who can play left-back, although Tierney can also be used at centre-back and has come off the bench as a wide player in a more advanced position. Oleksandr Zinchenko is another option at left-back but he may leave the club in this window, with Borussia Dortmund interested.

Tierney turned down opportunities to pursue a move abroad or to stay in the Premier League in favour of a return to Parkhead. German champions Bayer Leverkusen, Sevilla in Spain and Italian giants Juventus were interested in taking the Scotland international without a fee in the summer. Everton also showed an interest as they look to bolster David Moyes’s left-back options.

But he agreed a deal with Celtic, having left them six years ago for Arsenal in a £25 million move. In his first spell at Celtic, Tierney graduated from the academy before making his first-team breakthrough in 2015 and winning four titles and two Scottish Cups.

The Football Association, meanwhile, has published the written reasons for Lewis-Skelly’s red card appeal being upheld, after he was dismissed against Wolves by Michael Oliver. Arsenal submitted evidence which included overturned cases for Bruno Fernandes and Alexis Mac Allister.

“The commission members were unanimous in their opinion that the referee had made an obvious error in sending off MLS [Lewis-Skelly] for the challenge that he had made,” read the document. “The challenge was certainly ‘Foul Play’ but it obviously could not, to the mind of the commission, be categorised as having been ‘Serious Foul Play’. MLS had stepped across his opponent and tripped him up, possibly deliberately, but in doing so he had obviously not endangered the safety of his opponent or used excessive force or brutality, nor had he ‘lunged’ in at his opponent.”