Albion will address their loans headache during the January transfer window.

At least one of the short-term temporary signings will return to their parent club to solve the problem of having six loan players on the books but only being allowed to use five on a matchday.

Aston Villa pair Darren Bent and Gary Gardner, Norwich winger Elliott Bennett and Nottingham Forest utility player Greg Halford are on loan until the end of the year.

Boss Sami Hyypia said of the prospects of keeping them: “All would be very unlikely because I would like the situation to be that we don’t have six.

“Every week we have to leave one out, just because we have too many loan players. That’s one thing for sure we need to look at and work something different so we don’t have that kind of situation from January onwards.

“We are working on the loans a little bit and we'll tell them what the outcome is but at the moment I think it’s too early to speculate what is going to happen.”

Aston Villa left-back Joe Bennett and Liverpool midfielder Joao Teixeira are both on season-long loans.