because toby had been excellent for us while wimmer declined in last season?
He was only put in that position because Toby completely fucked up further up the pitch. He wouldn't have even been in that position if it wasn't for Toby's error. Also, he's sprinting back as fast as he can trying to keep an eye on about 3 different players. He did almost as well as he could in teh circumstances. I've seen Vertonghen and Dier make worse errors under less pressure before.
Nice article. Thanks for posting.Some nice nostalgia in the Athletic with an interview with our almost-title-winning third centre back back in the day.
https://theathletic.com/4973243/2023/10/19/kevin-wimmer-interview-spurs-son/
Kevin Wimmer on Tottenham title pushes, bromance with Son, and ‘the GOAT’ Dembele
Charlie Eccleshare
This time eight years ago, Tottenham Hotspur found themselves in a similar position to now.
A young, exciting team who hadn’t been fancied to do much at the start of the season but as the games ticked by were enjoying finding out what they were capable of under an empathetic, innovative head coach.
And, like now, Spurs were boosted by incoming players before the start of that 2015-16 season. Toby Alderweireld slotted in straight away, as did Dele Alli (he was signed in the January but immediately loaned back to MK Dons, so was making his first appearances for Tottenham), and Son Heung-min and Kieran Trippier went on to establish themselves as key players.
Another who arrived that summer was Kevin Wimmer, an Austrian centre-back signed from German club Cologne for £4.3million. Wimmer never hit the heights of those other players but, that season, he started 15 games in a row across all competitions between January and April as Spurs launched their surprise title bid.
And the two years he was at Tottenham, when they finished third and second in the Premier League, saw Wimmer be part of one of the most exciting periods in the club’s modern history.
“It was a very special time,” he tells The Athletic from Slovakia, where he plays for Slovan Bratislava. “To play with such big players, to be part of a dressing room with such great chemistry — being there was a dream come true.”
In the summer of 2017, Wimmer left for Stoke City, then still in the Premier League, for £18million, and spells back in Germany, in Belgium and in his Austrian homeland have followed.
His days at Spurs left a big mark on Wimmer, who enjoys looking back on a period that saw him become close with Dele and Eric Dier, marvel at the skills of Mousa Dembele, and almost help bring a shock title to White Hart Lane.
Perhaps the biggest legacy from his time in north London, which also provides a link with the team of today, is the bromance he developed with Son which still endures over six years later. Son, now Spurs’ captain, has since called Wimmer his “best friend” and said that “everyone’s my best friend here now – but not like Kevin!”
The pair were so close that, while they were team-mates, Wimmer joined Son in his native South Korea for a summer holiday; they still speak regularly.
There aren’t many regrets from his time at Tottenham, but he does single out the defeat to West Ham United in March 2016 as being a pivotal moment in missing out on the title to Leicester City: “We had one chance and we didn’t use it.”
These are Wimmer’s memories of Spurs in that golden period of 2015 to 2017, and of a disappointing coda to his time in England with Stoke.
An endearing, lighthearted character, Wimmer started at Spurs as he meant to go on — having his team-mates in stitches with his initiation song: a deadpan rendition of Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way.
Tottenham’s squad then was full of young, funny players, and the Spurs media team did a great job of showcasing their personalities. There was a Mario Kart video-game tournament that Wimmer took part in, and the club’s YouTube channel posted a group of the players, filmed by Wimmer, out and about in the streets of Barcelona playing rock-paper-scissors with a forfeit for the loser.
The players came across as a normal bunch of early twenty-somethings who just happened to be elite footballers.
“From the first day, I felt that the guys were really down to earth,” says Wimmer, now 30. “With so many games and so much pressure, it’s very important that the team is in a good mood. You need to have good chemistry and we definitely had this.”
Wimmer, Son and Kyle Walker were central to the good vibes at Spurs (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
It was a dressing room that included Harry Kane, Kyle Walker, Danny Rose, the current assistant head coach Ryan Mason, Son, Dier and Dele — all under 26 years of age at the start of Wimmer’s first season.
Son was the one whom Wimmer, 22 when he signed, clicked with straight away. “Sonny joined a few weeks after me and Allan Dixon (the player liaison officer), said, ‘A German-speaking player is coming, so you will have one guy you can speak to’.
“I was really surprised by his German. I knew he’d played for Bayer Leverkusenand Hamburg, but it was really good. And it was also very nice to speak my own language a little bit. He was just like you see him. He’s very friendly. He’s always funny, always positive. So he brings a very good attitude to the team. And yeah, we had a very good connection from the first day.
GO DEEPER
'It was quickly clear that he was a machine': Son's road to superstardom in the Bundesliga
“Having someone who could speak the same language was also good for him. In the beginning, his English was also not the best and we did so many things together. At training, we were always together and then afterwards, going for dinner or exploring the city. After I left, he never changed. He got better and better every season but his mentality never changed. He always stayed the same person. That’s why we are still in touch. At his level, it’s unique to have a character like this. He’s really one of the best.”
Discussing some of the other characters in that dressing room, Wimmer says: “Dele, Eric, Sonny and I were always together and had a very good connection. Eric was a very good guy and a really important character. He’s a Tottenham legend — there for so many years and always doing a good job, very professional.”
Looking back at time spent with Dele, Wimmer breaks into a smile. “He was a very funny guy. Always showing so much quality on the pitch, doing some things where you were thinking, ‘How is it possible?’.”
Like everyone who knows Dele, Wimmer was devastated to see the interview he gave in July when he revealed the difficulties he had faced in recent times and the horrific abuse he suffered in his childhood. “We went for dinner together many times and I knew that his childhood was not easy, but of course I never knew this (the revelations in the interview),” Wimmer says. “He was always under so much pressure and everybody expected so many things from him.
“I just hope that he feels better now and keeps getting better. And he is still a very good player. But the most important thing is that mentally he is in a good place.”
In that 2015-16 season, Dele symbolised what Spurs were about. Young, gifted, unafraid. They had finished fifth the previous season while largely going under the radar, and no one was talking them up during the summer. Certainly not as title challengers.
But things started to click around the turn of the year and by the time Wimmer came into the team in late January, after an injury to Jan Vertonghen, they were in the title race. His first Premier League start was on February 2, 2016 — a 3-0 win at Norwich City that moved Tottenham up to third, five points behind eventual champions Leicester.
‘The most important thing is that mentally he is in a good place,’ says Wimmer of Dele (Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
That was the second of Wimmer’s 15 consecutive starts, and a couple of weeks later, Spurs showcased their title credentials with a 2-1 win away to Manchester City. Two league games later, they had the chance to go top by beating West Ham. Instead, they lost 1-0 at Upton Park and never got as close to Leicester again.
“We had the chance when we played West Ham away,” Wimmer says. “We had one chance and we didn’t use it. It was a difficult game. A lot of fights, it was raining, a fighting game.
“We could never close the gap. Sometimes, you think back to this time because we saw it as such a big chance to win the title and it would have been very special for Spurs.
“But it was crazy, because Leicester were always winning. They always played a day after us towards the end and they didn’t always play so special, but at the end they somehow managed to win. Whereas we had a few games, like against Arsenal (a 2-2 home draw versus 10 men three days after the West Ham defeat), where we were so much better on the day but didn’t win.”
Leicester’s title was secured with a couple of games to spare when Spurs could only draw 2-2 away at Chelsea, in a ferocious encounter dubbed ‘the Battle of the Bridge’. Tottenham had a Premier League record nine players booked, and, as Wimmer says, “it should have been five red cards”.
Wimmer was on the bench that Monday night and had a good view of what unfolded as Chelsea, who had endured a dreadful season as defending champions and finished just 10th, upped their game to deny Spurs the title, then revelled in their rivals’ misery.
“In the last few minutes, you could see everybody realised the title was gone and there were so many emotions during this game and afterwards,” Wimmer says.
“The Chelsea and Spurs players were getting into each other, but then in the dressing room, it was so quiet. Everybody needed some time to realise what had happened. It was really, really disappointing.”
Stunned Tottenham lost their two remaining games, including a 5-1 final-day stinker away to Newcastle, and were pipped to runners-up spot by Arsenal.
The following season, it was once again Chelsea and West Ham who combined to thwart Spurs — Chelsea by winning the title, West Ham by inflicting a defeat (1-0, again) that pretty much ended their latest Premier League challenge. While Tottenham moved up a position to finish second, and picked up 86 points (16 more than in the previous season) as they scored the most and conceded the fewest goals in the league, they only very briefly felt like title contenders because of how relentlessly Antonio Conte’s Chelsea hoovered up wins.
“In that second season,” Wimmer says, “we didn’t have the feeling like we did the year before, when we had more of the feeling (that we could win it). We had a big chance.”
Wimmer also endured a much more difficult second season personally. He only played 10 times across all competitions (after 21 appearances the year before), as the imperious Alderweireld and Vertonghen partnership grew stronger and stronger, and Dier deputised when either was out. An own goal in a 1-1 draw at Arsenal was probably Wimmer’s most memorable contribution to the 2016-17 campaign.
Wimmer heads in an own goal at Arsenal in November 2016 (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Off the pitch, though, Wimmer continued to enjoy life at Tottenham — helped in no small part by Son. The pair had the ability to constantly make each other laugh, Wimmer teasing the ultra-modest Son about how good he was and enjoying watching his team-mate cringe.
They would go out for dinner, drive to training together (picking up Hugo Lloris, who lived near Son, on the way), visit London’s landmarks and hang out at each other’s houses. “When we were at his place, his mum always cooked for us,” Wimmer says. “It was really nice. His parents were also very humble and really, really friendly. And it was great to get to know his culture a bit more.
“His dad was always very strict with Sonny but he wanted him to become a very good player. He was very professional, and has been a very big influence on Son and his career.”
At the end of Son and Wimmer’s second season at the club, they went to South Korea with Ben Davies and Walker on a promotional trip for the club. A month later, Wimmer went back to Seoul, this time for a holiday with Son and another friend.
There was a slight snag when Son broke an arm playing for his country against Qatar and had to be in hospital for the first few days of the holiday. Once discharged, Son played the role of tour guide as he showed his buddy around the South Korean capital.
“He showed me the whole city,” Wimmer says. “We went to all different restaurants, shopping. Then you have the sea not too far from there. We were staying in a hotel in the hills, which overlooked the whole city. It was really nice.”
Being in Seoul, where Son is such a megastar, also gave Wimmer ample opportunity to tease his friend about his ludicrous profile back home. “I was always joking about this,” he says. “And because he didn’t tell me it would be like this, I said, ‘You are the most famous guy in South Korea’. But he was like, ‘No, no, it’s not so special’.
“It was crazy. Like I could never imagine. He was always wearing a face mask, so you could just see his eyes, and he would be in a special room in a restaurant, but people still recognised him and went crazy. Everybody knows him.
“And then you drive through the city and there are big billboards, and every billboard has Sonny’s face.”
A couple of months later, Wimmer and Son were separated when the Austrian left Spurs (this was the window when they signed Davinson Sanchez). Wimmer laughs when asked if Son cried at the news of his departure, but does add that even at Stoke, he would see Son whenever he was in London for a game or, sometimes, when he had a day off and could pop down from the English Midlands to the capital. They still speak regularly and are “always laughing” together.
Wimmer was sad to move on from Tottenham — and not just because of Son. He loved his time there and says of head coach Mauricio Pochettino: “He had a very good mix of being calm and fun in training, but then also being really focused.
“He had his perfect vision of how he wanted to play and then every training he explained it to every player. If you have the ball here, these players have to be there and these are what your options will be.”
Lloris also stands out for his guidance: “He was a very good captain, he always knew when to push us. And as a centre-back, he always tried to help you. He made my life easier because there was a lot of talking. He was a really good guy.”
And then there was Dembele, a man routinely described as the “GOAT” (greatest of all time) by their Spurs team-mates.
Wimmer says Dembele was ‘so important’ to Pochettino’s Spurs (Clive Rose/Getty Images)
“I always, always say it — the best player ever,” is Wimmer’s view. “This guy could easily play for Real Madrid in his prime and be one of the best players. So much class, never loses the ball, even if he has two or three opponents. He was so strong and technical, and his left foot was good. He was fast. He was so important for us and also for me — when he was playing as a No 6 in front of me, you always knew you were safe. Because if there are no options, there’s always the option to play to Mousa.
“In training, when we did four-a-side games and tournaments, when you were playing with Mousa, you knew you were going to win. His team will always win. (Which is) Crazy, because we had so much quality in the team. He made it look so easy and a lot of fun playing football.
“It was impossible to get the ball from him and he was still moving so fast, I don’t know how he did it. Every day. Sometimes players are amazing in training but then the game is different because there’s more pressure, it’s faster. But he was always the same.”
Wimmer’s time at Stoke was a big disappointment.
Mark Hughes, the manager who signed him, was sacked four months later and replaced by Paul Lambert.
Having been a regular for Hughes, and despite being the club’s record signing, Wimmer wasn’t even selected for a matchday squad under Lambert as the club ended up second-bottom and relegated from the Premier League. Wimmer, whose professionalism was not questioned at Stoke, is still baffled by how things unfolded for him there.
After three subsequent loans away on the continent, he eventually left Stoke permanently in 2021, joining Rapid Vienna in his home country. He moved to Slovan Bratislava, just across the border from Austria, this summer and is enjoying life there. He is a regular starter for a team second in their domestic league and now competing in the Europa Conference League group stage after losing in the Champions League and then Europa League qualifiers. A keen tennis player, he still picks up his racquet and has a hit during the off-season.
Looking at Tottenham now, he can see similarities with the team he played in — and between Postecoglou and Pochettino.
Naturally, he feels confident about the team’s prospects given they have the “world-class” Son, who he thinks, as “a perfect role model”, will be a great captain.
And should Son pick up the silverware that eluded him with Tottenham in 2016 and 2017, no one will be happier for him than his “best friend”.
Some nice nostalgia in the Athletic with an interview with our almost-title-winning third centre back back in the day.
https://theathletic.com/4973243/2023/10/19/kevin-wimmer-interview-spurs-son/
Kevin Wimmer on Tottenham title pushes, bromance with Son, and ‘the GOAT’ Dembele
Charlie Eccleshare
This time eight years ago, Tottenham Hotspur found themselves in a similar position to now.
A young, exciting team who hadn’t been fancied to do much at the start of the season but as the games ticked by were enjoying finding out what they were capable of under an empathetic, innovative head coach.
And, like now, Spurs were boosted by incoming players before the start of that 2015-16 season. Toby Alderweireld slotted in straight away, as did Dele Alli (he was signed in the January but immediately loaned back to MK Dons, so was making his first appearances for Tottenham), and Son Heung-min and Kieran Trippier went on to establish themselves as key players.
Another who arrived that summer was Kevin Wimmer, an Austrian centre-back signed from German club Cologne for £4.3million. Wimmer never hit the heights of those other players but, that season, he started 15 games in a row across all competitions between January and April as Spurs launched their surprise title bid.
And the two years he was at Tottenham, when they finished third and second in the Premier League, saw Wimmer be part of one of the most exciting periods in the club’s modern history.
“It was a very special time,” he tells The Athletic from Slovakia, where he plays for Slovan Bratislava. “To play with such big players, to be part of a dressing room with such great chemistry — being there was a dream come true.”
In the summer of 2017, Wimmer left for Stoke City, then still in the Premier League, for £18million, and spells back in Germany, in Belgium and in his Austrian homeland have followed.
His days at Spurs left a big mark on Wimmer, who enjoys looking back on a period that saw him become close with Dele and Eric Dier, marvel at the skills of Mousa Dembele, and almost help bring a shock title to White Hart Lane.
Perhaps the biggest legacy from his time in north London, which also provides a link with the team of today, is the bromance he developed with Son which still endures over six years later. Son, now Spurs’ captain, has since called Wimmer his “best friend” and said that “everyone’s my best friend here now – but not like Kevin!”
The pair were so close that, while they were team-mates, Wimmer joined Son in his native South Korea for a summer holiday; they still speak regularly.
There aren’t many regrets from his time at Tottenham, but he does single out the defeat to West Ham United in March 2016 as being a pivotal moment in missing out on the title to Leicester City: “We had one chance and we didn’t use it.”
These are Wimmer’s memories of Spurs in that golden period of 2015 to 2017, and of a disappointing coda to his time in England with Stoke.
An endearing, lighthearted character, Wimmer started at Spurs as he meant to go on — having his team-mates in stitches with his initiation song: a deadpan rendition of Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way.
Tottenham’s squad then was full of young, funny players, and the Spurs media team did a great job of showcasing their personalities. There was a Mario Kart video-game tournament that Wimmer took part in, and the club’s YouTube channel posted a group of the players, filmed by Wimmer, out and about in the streets of Barcelona playing rock-paper-scissors with a forfeit for the loser.
The players came across as a normal bunch of early twenty-somethings who just happened to be elite footballers.
“From the first day, I felt that the guys were really down to earth,” says Wimmer, now 30. “With so many games and so much pressure, it’s very important that the team is in a good mood. You need to have good chemistry and we definitely had this.”
Wimmer, Son and Kyle Walker were central to the good vibes at Spurs (Alex Livesey/Getty Images)
It was a dressing room that included Harry Kane, Kyle Walker, Danny Rose, the current assistant head coach Ryan Mason, Son, Dier and Dele — all under 26 years of age at the start of Wimmer’s first season.
Son was the one whom Wimmer, 22 when he signed, clicked with straight away. “Sonny joined a few weeks after me and Allan Dixon (the player liaison officer), said, ‘A German-speaking player is coming, so you will have one guy you can speak to’.
“I was really surprised by his German. I knew he’d played for Bayer Leverkusenand Hamburg, but it was really good. And it was also very nice to speak my own language a little bit. He was just like you see him. He’s very friendly. He’s always funny, always positive. So he brings a very good attitude to the team. And yeah, we had a very good connection from the first day.
GO DEEPER
'It was quickly clear that he was a machine': Son's road to superstardom in the Bundesliga
“Having someone who could speak the same language was also good for him. In the beginning, his English was also not the best and we did so many things together. At training, we were always together and then afterwards, going for dinner or exploring the city. After I left, he never changed. He got better and better every season but his mentality never changed. He always stayed the same person. That’s why we are still in touch. At his level, it’s unique to have a character like this. He’s really one of the best.”
Discussing some of the other characters in that dressing room, Wimmer says: “Dele, Eric, Sonny and I were always together and had a very good connection. Eric was a very good guy and a really important character. He’s a Tottenham legend — there for so many years and always doing a good job, very professional.”
Looking back at time spent with Dele, Wimmer breaks into a smile. “He was a very funny guy. Always showing so much quality on the pitch, doing some things where you were thinking, ‘How is it possible?’.”
Like everyone who knows Dele, Wimmer was devastated to see the interview he gave in July when he revealed the difficulties he had faced in recent times and the horrific abuse he suffered in his childhood. “We went for dinner together many times and I knew that his childhood was not easy, but of course I never knew this (the revelations in the interview),” Wimmer says. “He was always under so much pressure and everybody expected so many things from him.
“I just hope that he feels better now and keeps getting better. And he is still a very good player. But the most important thing is that mentally he is in a good place.”
In that 2015-16 season, Dele symbolised what Spurs were about. Young, gifted, unafraid. They had finished fifth the previous season while largely going under the radar, and no one was talking them up during the summer. Certainly not as title challengers.
But things started to click around the turn of the year and by the time Wimmer came into the team in late January, after an injury to Jan Vertonghen, they were in the title race. His first Premier League start was on February 2, 2016 — a 3-0 win at Norwich City that moved Tottenham up to third, five points behind eventual champions Leicester.
‘The most important thing is that mentally he is in a good place,’ says Wimmer of Dele (Stephen Pond/Getty Images)
That was the second of Wimmer’s 15 consecutive starts, and a couple of weeks later, Spurs showcased their title credentials with a 2-1 win away to Manchester City. Two league games later, they had the chance to go top by beating West Ham. Instead, they lost 1-0 at Upton Park and never got as close to Leicester again.
“We had the chance when we played West Ham away,” Wimmer says. “We had one chance and we didn’t use it. It was a difficult game. A lot of fights, it was raining, a fighting game.
“We could never close the gap. Sometimes, you think back to this time because we saw it as such a big chance to win the title and it would have been very special for Spurs.
“But it was crazy, because Leicester were always winning. They always played a day after us towards the end and they didn’t always play so special, but at the end they somehow managed to win. Whereas we had a few games, like against Arsenal (a 2-2 home draw versus 10 men three days after the West Ham defeat), where we were so much better on the day but didn’t win.”
Leicester’s title was secured with a couple of games to spare when Spurs could only draw 2-2 away at Chelsea, in a ferocious encounter dubbed ‘the Battle of the Bridge’. Tottenham had a Premier League record nine players booked, and, as Wimmer says, “it should have been five red cards”.
Wimmer was on the bench that Monday night and had a good view of what unfolded as Chelsea, who had endured a dreadful season as defending champions and finished just 10th, upped their game to deny Spurs the title, then revelled in their rivals’ misery.
“In the last few minutes, you could see everybody realised the title was gone and there were so many emotions during this game and afterwards,” Wimmer says.
“The Chelsea and Spurs players were getting into each other, but then in the dressing room, it was so quiet. Everybody needed some time to realise what had happened. It was really, really disappointing.”
Stunned Tottenham lost their two remaining games, including a 5-1 final-day stinker away to Newcastle, and were pipped to runners-up spot by Arsenal.
The following season, it was once again Chelsea and West Ham who combined to thwart Spurs — Chelsea by winning the title, West Ham by inflicting a defeat (1-0, again) that pretty much ended their latest Premier League challenge. While Tottenham moved up a position to finish second, and picked up 86 points (16 more than in the previous season) as they scored the most and conceded the fewest goals in the league, they only very briefly felt like title contenders because of how relentlessly Antonio Conte’s Chelsea hoovered up wins.
“In that second season,” Wimmer says, “we didn’t have the feeling like we did the year before, when we had more of the feeling (that we could win it). We had a big chance.”
Wimmer also endured a much more difficult second season personally. He only played 10 times across all competitions (after 21 appearances the year before), as the imperious Alderweireld and Vertonghen partnership grew stronger and stronger, and Dier deputised when either was out. An own goal in a 1-1 draw at Arsenal was probably Wimmer’s most memorable contribution to the 2016-17 campaign.
Wimmer heads in an own goal at Arsenal in November 2016 (Stuart MacFarlane/Arsenal FC via Getty Images)
Off the pitch, though, Wimmer continued to enjoy life at Tottenham — helped in no small part by Son. The pair had the ability to constantly make each other laugh, Wimmer teasing the ultra-modest Son about how good he was and enjoying watching his team-mate cringe.
They would go out for dinner, drive to training together (picking up Hugo Lloris, who lived near Son, on the way), visit London’s landmarks and hang out at each other’s houses. “When we were at his place, his mum always cooked for us,” Wimmer says. “It was really nice. His parents were also very humble and really, really friendly. And it was great to get to know his culture a bit more.
“His dad was always very strict with Sonny but he wanted him to become a very good player. He was very professional, and has been a very big influence on Son and his career.”
At the end of Son and Wimmer’s second season at the club, they went to South Korea with Ben Davies and Walker on a promotional trip for the club. A month later, Wimmer went back to Seoul, this time for a holiday with Son and another friend.
There was a slight snag when Son broke an arm playing for his country against Qatar and had to be in hospital for the first few days of the holiday. Once discharged, Son played the role of tour guide as he showed his buddy around the South Korean capital.
“He showed me the whole city,” Wimmer says. “We went to all different restaurants, shopping. Then you have the sea not too far from there. We were staying in a hotel in the hills, which overlooked the whole city. It was really nice.”
Being in Seoul, where Son is such a megastar, also gave Wimmer ample opportunity to tease his friend about his ludicrous profile back home. “I was always joking about this,” he says. “And because he didn’t tell me it would be like this, I said, ‘You are the most famous guy in South Korea’. But he was like, ‘No, no, it’s not so special’.
“It was crazy. Like I could never imagine. He was always wearing a face mask, so you could just see his eyes, and he would be in a special room in a restaurant, but people still recognised him and went crazy. Everybody knows him.
“And then you drive through the city and there are big billboards, and every billboard has Sonny’s face.”
A couple of months later, Wimmer and Son were separated when the Austrian left Spurs (this was the window when they signed Davinson Sanchez). Wimmer laughs when asked if Son cried at the news of his departure, but does add that even at Stoke, he would see Son whenever he was in London for a game or, sometimes, when he had a day off and could pop down from the English Midlands to the capital. They still speak regularly and are “always laughing” together.
Wimmer was sad to move on from Tottenham — and not just because of Son. He loved his time there and says of head coach Mauricio Pochettino: “He had a very good mix of being calm and fun in training, but then also being really focused.
“He had his perfect vision of how he wanted to play and then every training he explained it to every player. If you have the ball here, these players have to be there and these are what your options will be.”
Lloris also stands out for his guidance: “He was a very good captain, he always knew when to push us. And as a centre-back, he always tried to help you. He made my life easier because there was a lot of talking. He was a really good guy.”
And then there was Dembele, a man routinely described as the “GOAT” (greatest of all time) by their Spurs team-mates.
Wimmer says Dembele was ‘so important’ to Pochettino’s Spurs (Clive Rose/Getty Images)
“I always, always say it — the best player ever,” is Wimmer’s view. “This guy could easily play for Real Madrid in his prime and be one of the best players. So much class, never loses the ball, even if he has two or three opponents. He was so strong and technical, and his left foot was good. He was fast. He was so important for us and also for me — when he was playing as a No 6 in front of me, you always knew you were safe. Because if there are no options, there’s always the option to play to Mousa.
“In training, when we did four-a-side games and tournaments, when you were playing with Mousa, you knew you were going to win. His team will always win. (Which is) Crazy, because we had so much quality in the team. He made it look so easy and a lot of fun playing football.
“It was impossible to get the ball from him and he was still moving so fast, I don’t know how he did it. Every day. Sometimes players are amazing in training but then the game is different because there’s more pressure, it’s faster. But he was always the same.”
Wimmer’s time at Stoke was a big disappointment.
Mark Hughes, the manager who signed him, was sacked four months later and replaced by Paul Lambert.
Having been a regular for Hughes, and despite being the club’s record signing, Wimmer wasn’t even selected for a matchday squad under Lambert as the club ended up second-bottom and relegated from the Premier League. Wimmer, whose professionalism was not questioned at Stoke, is still baffled by how things unfolded for him there.
After three subsequent loans away on the continent, he eventually left Stoke permanently in 2021, joining Rapid Vienna in his home country. He moved to Slovan Bratislava, just across the border from Austria, this summer and is enjoying life there. He is a regular starter for a team second in their domestic league and now competing in the Europa Conference League group stage after losing in the Champions League and then Europa League qualifiers. A keen tennis player, he still picks up his racquet and has a hit during the off-season.
Looking at Tottenham now, he can see similarities with the team he played in — and between Postecoglou and Pochettino.
Naturally, he feels confident about the team’s prospects given they have the “world-class” Son, who he thinks, as “a perfect role model”, will be a great captain.
And should Son pick up the silverware that eluded him with Tottenham in 2016 and 2017, no one will be happier for him than his “best friend”.
