Karlan Grant and the West Brom loan spell recovery rate

When you see the term loan recovery, it sounds more like a financial term. But in this case it is being used in the context of players going out on loan from West Brom, returning to The Hawthorns and ripping it up.

Last season it was Cedric Kipre and Alex Mowatt. For Kipre, he was someone who had been out on more than one loan spell, and many thought his Albion days were numbered.

Carlos Corberan made sure they weren't and he turned into one of the league's best defenders last season. The shame for Albion was the fact that it all happened in the final year of his contract.

Mowatt falls under a similar bracket but many thought he still had a future at Albion, and so it proved both last season and in the current campaign.

And now the current poster boy for the revitalisation of loan players is Karlan Grant. We've taken up a number of column inches this season waxing lyrical about the impact Grant has made since coming in from his spell at Cardiff City.

On Wednesday evening after Grant bagged his fifth goal of a blistering campaign so far, he insisted that many believed he would not be at the club this summer let alone be one of the top performers.

But he has been. He has displayed and delivered such a comeback, and shown exactly what you need to do when you return from a spell away from the club.

It would have been very easy for Grant, who signed a long term contact when he arrived in 2020, to go through the motions and head back out on loan moves until his contract expired in 2026.

However, he has done the total opposite. Knuckled down, worked hard, and shown and the quality and consistency Albion were looking for when they paid £15m for him from Huddersfield Town.

He has surprised almost everyone among the fanbase, he certainly has surprised me because despite having an 18 goal campaign in his second season, the large majority of his time at Albion he has been underwhelming.

Despite stopping short of stating he is proving doubters wrong when he spoke on Wednesday, he is doing just that and he is proving that just because you are farmed out on loan, it doesn't mean your time at a club is over.

Without digging deep into EFL squads and loans and players returning to clubs and flourished, it is hard to put an accurate percentage on the number of success stories there are in this department.

However, for players out there who have been sent out on loan, there are plenty of examples to look at from Albion in recent years on how you should go about turning things around.

And Grant is the prime example of that this season.