Spurs played a blinder with Kevin Wimmer | OneFootball

While Daniel Levy has hardly been the most popular figure at Spurs over the years, if there’s one thing the club’s chairman has proven, is that he’s a very tough negotiator.

His work in the transfer market has seen some mixed success, but when it’s come to offloading players, his desire to drive a hard bargain and get the absolute best out of a deal has seen the Lilywhites profit massively – not least from forgotten man Kevin Wimmer.

After watching him make his first Premier League start against Crystal Palace, then Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino raved about what 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.”

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A truly wasted talent...

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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 £18m, 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 – 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.

And then, last summer, it was revealed that the big central defender had had his contract at Stoke terminated, and he has since joined returned home to his native Austria to play for Rapid Vienna.

It’s been a huge fall from grace for the Austria international, but one that surely has Levy laughing all the way to the bank.

To get a fee of £18m for him, and now for Wimmer to be worth just £720k 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.