“Seemed like a young talent with a high ceiling” – Middlesbrough fan pundit identifies 21-cap international as club’s biggest disappointment | OneFootball

This article is part of Football League World’s ‘Terrace Talk‘ series, which provides personal opinions from our FLW Fan Pundits regarding the latest breaking news, teams, players, managers, potential signings and more…

Middlesbrough have had plenty of transfer flops over the years as they’ve gone between the Premier League and the Championship, with big-money purchases such as Britt Assombalonga and Afonso Alves not exactly working out as planned.

However, FLW’s Boro fan pundit Dana Malt believes that Viktor Fischer is perhaps the biggest disappointment in recent years to arrive at the Riverside Stadium out of players who were on paper expected to make an impression.

Fischer signed for the Teessiders in May 2016 from Ajax for a fee of €5 million, joining a Boro side that had just won promotion from the Championship to become a top flight club once again.

The winger had played 111 times for Ajax in all competitions, scoring 33 goals, but he was never able to live up to the hype when he arrived in the Premier League.

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Fischer appeared just 13 times in England’s top level, and no sooner had he arrived in the North East he had departed, with Boro making a loss on the Dane by selling him to Mainz of Germany for €3 million.

Capped 21 times for his country in his career, Fischer’s career has continued to be low-key, having played for Kobenhavn and Royal Antwerp since, with Dana incredibly disappointed in his time at her club.

“Boro have had a few players that haven’t lived up to the hype, so let me say that firstly,” Dana said.

“My mind is going straight to Viktor Fischer, and I think it’s because when we were looking at that summer window in 2016, we were looking at a jump-up in terms of the calibre of player we were bringing in, and Fischer came into Middlesbrough with a lot of hype around him.

“He had come from the famous Ajax academy, he played in the Champions League – and this is a massive club in Ajax as well, a regular player for them – and he seemed like a young talent with a high ceiling, and yet it just didn’t materialise.

“And in the end, maybe there was a reason why Viktor Fischer was at Middlesbrough and not a better-placed club in the top five European divisions.”

Not everyone who comes through the famed Ajax academy system goes on to make it big, as Fischer has proven.

The forward was already in and out of the Denmark national side when he arrived in the Premier League, and he could have used it as a platform to build himself and become a mainstay for his country.

However, it ended up going the other way and his career has never quite been the same since.

Fischer did have one season at Kobenhavn where he hit double figures for goals, but the fact he is now plying his trade for Antwerp in Belgium – now at the age of 28 – shows that he failed to live up to all of his potential from when he was a youngster.