After watching him make his first Premier League start against Crystal Palace, then Tottenham manager Mauricio Pochettino raved about what Kevin Wimmer could bring to the table.
He said: “He is like Vertonghen but younger. You can see he (Wimmer) is very calm, he has a very good left foot. He is very strong, a nice person. He has a lot of attributes. He is very young and for that we signed him.
“We are sure that Kevin can do well. He had the possibility to play in different games – maybe not as much as he expected – and he was good. He showed the quality and his teammates trust him.”
Sadly for Wimmer and Spurs, things didn’t quite work out the way they would have wanted. Just a few years after joining, the Austrian joined Stoke City for a reported fee of around £17m, with the centre-back barely making a genuine mark on the Spurs first-team in his time in north London.
He made just 31 appearances for the club before his switch to Stoke, and from then on, things have just gone from bad to worse for the defender.
After dropping completely out of favour with the Potters this season – so much so that the 28-year-old even started playing more regularly for the club’s U23s – Wimmer was allowed to join German second-tier side Karlsruher on loan in the January transfer window.
And, if to make matters even worse for him, after starting the first couple of games at his new club, Wimmer has been dropped to the bench for his side’s last three league fixtures.
It’s been a huge fall from grace for the Austria international, but one that surely has Daniel Levy laughing all the way to the bank. To get a fee of £17m for him, and now for Wimmer to be worth just £1.35m as per Transfermarkt speaks volumes about the kind of backroom work that the Spurs chief did when cashing in on him.
Make no mistake about it, given Pochettino’s hype about him, and just how few games he ended up playing for Spurs, Wimmer was a disaster in north London. But he’s been even worse since leaving the Lilywhites, and that just says it all.
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