Tottenham Hotspur chief Fabio Paratici has played the transfer market well in an attempt to improve Antonio Conte’s squad for the 2022/23 campaign.
The Italian sporting director has been able to offload the likes of Steven Bergwijn, Cameron Carter-Vickers, Tanguy Ndombele (on loan) and Matt Doherty throughout the season, whilst bringing in the likes of Richarlison, Pedro Porro, Yves Bissouma and Arnaut Danjuma, among others.
Being able to sell players is just as important as bringing them in, as the funds generated by sales can be used to make important additions to the squad. That is an area where Spurs chairman Daniel Levy has done well in the past.
One player with whom he and Tottenham hit the jackpot was centre-back Kevin Wimmer, who was brought in for a relatively small fee before yielding a substantial profit after just two years.
The then-22-year-old was signed from German outfit Koln for a reported fee of £4.3m in the summer of 2015 and was dubbed a young, hungry player with room to progress.
How did Kevin Wimmer perform at Tottenham?
In his first season at the club, Wimmer was a steady performer when given the opportunity to play. The left-footed defender averaged a Sofascore rating of 7.00 across his ten appearances in the Premier League, making 2.5 tackles and interceptions per game and keeping four clean sheets.
The Austrian, who Kyle Walker dubbed “top-class”, also caught the eye in the Europa League with an average Sofascore rating of 7.03 across six games in the competition, in which he made a whopping 4.3 tackles and interceptions per game and won 64% of his duels.
However, he followed that up with a disappointing 2016/17 campaign as he averaged a Sofascore rating of 6.60, which shows that his performance levels took a huge dip from his debut season at Spurs, with just 1.4 tackles and interceptions per match across five top-flight outings.
Despite his struggles, then-Premier League outfit Stoke City swooped in to sign the Austrian for a whopping £18m as Levy extracted as much money as possible from the Potters.
This means that Spurs made a profit of roughly 319% in two years on Wimmer, despite him only playing in 15 league matches. The defender went on to struggle at the bet365 Stadium as he was dubbed a “flop” by journalist John Percy, leaving on a free transfer in 2021 after making just 19 appearances for the club in all competitions.
Therefore, Levy struck gold on the 30-year-old, as the Tottenham chief picked him up for an insignificant fee and made a sizeable profit on him within the space of just two seasons, whilst the Austrian’s failure at Stoke also shows that it was not a mistake for Spurs to sanction the sale.