£22m star admits he nearly joined Middlesbrough from north-east rivals

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Championship strugglers Boro could do with a striker like Fulham’s Aleksandar Mitrovic – he held talks when he was still a Newcastle United player.

Aleksandar Mitrovic has admitted that he was in talks with Middlesbrough when he decided to leave north east neighbours Newcastle United in 2018, speaking to the May edition of FourFourTwo.

If only Jonathan Woodgate had a striker as lethal as the hot-headed Serb at his disposal.

Relegation-threatened Boro are the Championship’s lowest goalscorers with just 37 strikes in 37 games to their name. Mitrovic, meanwhile, has 23 all on his own, firing Fulham into promotion contention almost single-handedly at times.

But, before he joined the Cottagers in a £22 million deal, Mitrovic came close to making a contentious switch from Tyneside to Riverside in one of those sliding door moments which will not make for happy reading in Middlesbrough.

“Newcastle called and said Middlesbrough would sign me. At that point I said I’d go anywhere, so my agent started negotiating with Boro,” the former Anderlecht hero says.

“I was looking at WhatsApp, and then I saw (Fulham manager) Slavisa Jokanovic’s name.

“On deadline day I got bored with waiting, so I sent him a message saying: ‘Hi, how are you?’. He messaged me back, asking if it was true that my deal had broken down, and saying he still needed a striker.

“I replied: ‘Yes please, I want to join Fulham’.”

Mitrovic is valued at £40 million these days, according to the Daily Star – a fee which put off both Tottenham and Aston Villa during the recent January transfer window.

And Boro fans everywhere must be wondering what might have been if they, rather than Fulham, had signed the most prolific striker in the Championship. They certainly wouldn’t be fretting about their survival, that’s for sure.