Antonio Conte is ready to sign a contract extension with Chelsea which will establish him as the highest-paid manager in the club’s history as he seeks to secure a Premier League and FA Cup Double with victory over Arsenal at Wembley.

Chelsea are expected to offer the Italian a deal worth around £9.6m a year until 2021, two years beyond his current contract’s expiry, in the wake of a hugely impressive first year in English football. Conte anticipates returning briefly to Italy for a break after the FA Cup final and the club’s end-of-season awards night in Battersea on Sunday, but will soon be back in London to continue planning for next season.

Confirmation of his new deal will follow. “My situation is very clear: I have two more years’ contract with the club,” said Conte. “Then, if the club give me the possibility to stay here and to extend my contract, for sure I am available to do this. We have the same idea about the future and we’ve started to work for next season. For sure we’ll try to improve our squad because we have to face an important competition in the Champions League. But I think the club and me, we have the same point of view on this. I hope to stay here for many years.”

Conte, who has been the subject of strong interest from Internazionale, is understood to be stepping up his English lessons this summer and will be joined in England by his wife, Elisabetta, and nine-year-old daughter, Vittoria, from the start of next season. The 46-year-old’s focus at present is on achieving Chelsea’s second Double – emulating the achievement of Carlo Ancelotti in his first year at the club in 2009-10 – with victory at Wembley and he has admitted the team’s progress this season has surprised him, particularly after they were badly beaten at Arsenal on 24 September.

That 3-0 defeat prompted Roman Abramovich to spend three days at Cobham observing training. The owner’s presence might, in the past, have signalled the worst for the manager. “But he watched our sessions, saw our video analysis and stayed with us, supporting me,” said Conte, who is expected to prefer Nemanja Matic to Cesc Fàbregas in the Chelsea midfield on Saturday. “He never showed me he was angry. I think the club always saw my job, during pre-season and in that period, and trusted in me. I never thought the club was thinking about sacking me. Honestly.

“But it was very difficult to think we’d arrive at the end of the season and be celebrating winning the league back then. Not impossible but very difficult. In that period we had a lot of big problems to solve and to find the right solution quickly is not easy. In fact, at the start of the season, if you’d said we could qualify for the Champions League, I’d have signed for that. But then I found great players, players who could implement our ideas and changes, and we were able to change our season.”

Chelsea’s recovery from that defeat at the Emirates extended to a 13-game winning streak, with the title claimed by seven points from Tottenham Hotspur. The champions’ motivation at Wembley extends to setting an early tone for next season. “All of the players are ready and even for the next season I think Saturday is a good opportunity to put pressure on Arsenal and on all our rivals also,” said Eden Hazard. “If we win, it’s good to prepare the next season.

Play Video 0:52 Arsène Wenger and Antonio Conte look forward to FA Cup final – video

“I hope this is the start of something. We have this new manager, we have a couple of young players, so everything is ready to build. The last 10 years in Chelsea were great. The team won a lot of trophies but now it’s like a new generation. Frank Lampard is finished, Didier Drogba is finished, Ashley Cole, now John Terry. All gone. So it’s a new generation and we want to prove that the club is one of the best in the world. We have to be ready for that.”

Abramovich will fund further squad strengthening, with the Monaco midfielder Tiemoué Bakayoko expected to be the first player to move to Stamford Bridge, with the Champions League campaign in mind. Southampton’s Virgil van Dijk is another target and will challenge Gary Cahill as the left-sided of the three centre-halves. The England defender had been the subject of £6m and £12m bids from Arsenal while at Bolton in 2011, the first of which was dismissed as “derisory” by the Wanderers manager at the time, Owen Coyle.

Cahill would go on to join Chelsea for £7m six months later and while Arsenal fret over the makeup of their backline in the absence of Laurent Koscielny and Gabriel, Chelsea will go into the FA Cup final hoping to secure his seventh piece of major silverware in five years. “[The move to Arsenal] was close to happening, but it broke down on the fee,” said Cahill. “It never got down to whether or not I wanted to go there, it was between the two clubs. They showed interest, but they couldn’t agree a fee and that was it.”