Tottenham Hotspur reportedly wanted to bring Red Bull Salzburg wonderkid Dimitri Oberlin to the Premier league.
The fall of Dimitri Oberlin was as fast as his rise.
A player who shot to fame two years ago with a flurry of goals to spark speculation with some of the leading clubs of European football has gone from future star to a 21-year-old also-ran in the blinking of an eye.
According to Salzburger Nachrichten in 2018, Tottenham Hotspur were interested in two of Red Bull Salzburg’s most exciting youngsters. The first, tenacious, all-action midfielder Amadou Haidara is now a Bundesliga regular with table-toppers RB Leipzig.
The second, a little-known striker with a growing reputation, had just enjoyed a staggering breakthrough season with Basel with an unstoppable display in a 5-0 battering of Benfica in the Champions League group-stage catapulting him into the mainstream.
And with Spurs always on the lookout for potential future superstars, Oberlin felt like a signing with Mauricio Pochettino’s fingerprints all over it.
Unfortunately, it’s all gone downhill since then for a player who has been absent from the gossip columns for well over a year now. It’s a fickle game football but, in Oberlin’s case, it is hard the bare statistics don’t paint a particularly pretty picture.
Oberlin is still a Salzburg player, but while Haidara is going from strength to strength in Germany, the striker continues to toil on loan away from the Austrian champions. In 42 games for Empoli and Zulte Waregam and Basel (again), Oberlin has scored just twice.
On current form, don’t expect Harry Kane to be quaking in his boots any time soon.
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