English Premier League (EPL) club Stoke City looks set to boost its defensive stocks by signing 24-year-old Greek international defender Kostas Stafylidis.

The left back will be new Stoke City Manager Paul Lambert’s first signing after Lambert replaced outgoing manager Mark Hughes at the club, which currently lies third from bottom in the EPL.

Stafylidis will join Stoke on loan from Bundesliga club Augsburg after reports previously linked him with Roma and Fiorentina. Stafylidis spent his youth playing football at PAOK before moving to Leverkusen in 2012. The move to Stoke will be his second spell in the UK having spent 2014/15 playing on loan to Fulham in the Championship where he caught the eye as an attacking left back with a dangerous left foot at set pieces.

Stafylidis will be the second Greek defender to sign with an EPL club during the current January transfer window. Earlier this month, Arsenal signed 20-year-old central defender Konstantinos Mavropanos from Greek Super League club PAS Giannina for £1.9 million, with early reports indicating that the Gunners intended to loan out Mavropanos to Bundesliga side Werder Bremen. Since arriving at Arsenal, the young defender has reportedly impressed Wenger to the extent that the Gunners’ boss named him in the first team bench in the recent Carabao Cup against Chelsea and in last week’s 2-1 league defeat against Bournemouth.

That was followed last Monday by Mavropanos’s Arsenal U23 debut in a 4-0 home win against Manchester United reserves, in which he performed impressively, not only playing the entire 90 minutes, but dominating aerial duels and showing composure with the ball at his feet.

Apparently Arsenal manager Wenger has been so impressed he’s considering keeping the youngster till the end of the current season rather than loaning him to Werder Bremen.

He said of Mavropanos, “I personally want to keep him until May to know him better, to assess his level.

“The first signs he showed in training were so encouraging that I decided to keep him.”

Wenger added, “Greece is a fantastic sporting country. Their basketball and football is absolutely amazing. They have a real knowledge of team sport and they produce fantastic players.”

Given Arsenal’s current injury concerns with defenders Monreal, Kolasinac, and Koscielny as well as the ageing Per Mertesacker, Mavropanos may find himself making his senior Arsenal debut much sooner than he expected.