Midfielder Imran Louza has joined French Ligue 1 side Lorient on loan for the remainder of the season.

There is no indication that the French side are obliged to purchase the player at the end of the loan spell.

The club, based in Brittany, are currently bottom of the table having lost seven of their last nine games, during which time they haven’t won.

Louza cost the Hornets around €10m when he joined from Nantes in 2021, and after featuring in only one of the first 11 games of the 21/22 Premier League season, he went on to make 20 appearances before a knee injury curtailed his campaign.

He didn’t play at all under Rob Edwards because of that knee problem, but return to the team as a substitute in Slaven Bilic’s first game in charge and got an assist in the 4-0 win.

He was making his fifth appearance in mid-October away at Millwall when he suffered a serious ankle injury early in 3-0.

Not only did it rule him out of action until February, it also meant he missed the chance to play for Morocco at the World Cup.

He ended last season with five goals and four assists from 21 appearances, and the signs were that he would push on again this term as he was named as one of new head coach Valerien Ismael’s senior player group.

Indeed, he started the first three games of the season claimed a goal and an assist in the opening day 4-0 rout of QPR.

The earliest hint of a problem came when he was the first player to fall foul on the new stricter rules drawn up by the players and implemented by Ismael.

Poor timekeeping saw him dropped to the bench for the home game with Blackburn on August 27, but he came on at half-time and then started seven of the next eight games.

“Everyone has to respect rules, it’s as simple as that,” said the Watford boss at the time, adding: “Imran knows exactly why he was on the bench today.”

However, as the Hornets began to breathe life into their season after only winning two of the first 11 games, Louza became more and more peripheral.

After starting the 1-0 win over Sheffield Wednesday on October 21, the midfielder has only been named in the XI once, and that was the 2-0 defeat at Leicester where Watford were overrun and Louza looked off the pace before being replaced before the hour-mark.

He was not named in Morocco’s initial squad for African Cup of Nations, meaning he would miss a second major tournament.

Louza was out of the squad totally for four games, and then made a brief appearance from the bench in the 3-3 draw at Plymouth.

One of the games Louza was not involved in was the 2-1 win at Blackburn, during which he took to social media with a series of strange posts and replies to supports as The Watford Observer reported at the time.

That only heightened the belief that he would move away from the club during the January window and when he wasn’t at QPR on Sunday it was pretty clear he was indeed on his way out.