Boro boss Tony Mowbray is preparing a major overhaul of his squad at the turn of the year, with Saturday's 1-0 home defeat to Millwall having plunged the Teessiders back into the Championship relegation zone.
Mowbray is hoping to sign up to four or five players, but will first have to generate funds and make a major reduction to a wage bill that is believed to be the highest outside the Premier League.
With Gordon Strachan having spent around £12m during his 12 months at the Riverside, Boro chairman Steve Gibson is not in a position to make further funds available despite the obvious need for reinforcements.
As a result, Mowbray will listen to offers for the vast majority of his squad, and Villa will be first out of the starting blocks in the race to sign Wheater, who is due to become a free agent in June.
The Midlands club's scouts have watched the Redcarborn 23-year-old on a regular basis for the last three seasons, but while tentative discussions took place when Stewart Downing moved to Villa Park, no deal for Wheater was agreed.
That could change in January, with new Villa boss Gerard Houllier, whose side lost 2-0 at Sam Allardyce's Blackburn yesterday, keen to reinforce a defence that has been stretched on a number of occasions in the first half of the season.
While Houllier spent six seasons out of English football before moving to Villa Park in September, he is aware of Wheater's qualities and has been impressed by his club's scouting reports.
The Frenchman is expected to drive a hard bargain though, in the knowledge that Boro will lose Wheater for nothing if they are unable to sell him in January.
The Teessiders are hoping to receive up to £2m for the former England Under-21 international, and will be aware of both Stoke and Everton's long-standing interest in his services.
Wheater was part of the Boro side that slipped to their fourth home defeat of the season at the weekend, a result that merely underlined the need for significant changes in January.
We are obviously looking to change and improve things, said Mowbray.
We will have to see what January brings.
We will have to see if there is any interest in any of our players, and whether we are in a position to be able to do anything ourselves.
You look at the balance of the team and the squad, and maybe at the moment the balance just isn't quite right.
We have two strikers (Kris Boyd and Scott McDonald) who have scored lots of goals in Scotland, but they are both finishers.
We are probably lacking that bit of a cutting edge.
We want to move this club forward, but the change that happened at West Brom three or four years ago took time.
It's easy to look back now and think it happened overnight, but it didn't.
You don't change teams or dressing rooms overnight, you do it over a number of years or a period of transfer windows.
But you can't go into battle asking something of players that does not come naturally to them.
Jason Puncheon's first-half winner means Mowbray has now lost three of his five matches since replacing Strachan last month, and Bristol City's home win over Leicester sent his side crashing back into the relegation places.
Fellow strugglers Hull City visit the Riverside next weekend, and while it is too early to talk about must-win matches, the doomsday scenario of demotion to League One can no longer be regarded as a fanciful scenario.
More than a third of the season has gone, and Middlesbrough are not in the bottom three because events have conspired against them.
Even Mowbray is honest enough to accept that the current league table provides a realistic reflection of their standing.
We've had two victories and three defeats, but I arrived to a team in the bottom four or five and that's probably about the kind of return you would expect in that position,
he said.
That's where we are, and until we can change that, we're working as hard as we can to try to get results.
You have to put it into context.
There are around 30 games to go, so that's 90-odd points still to play for.
We have to start winning football games.
We're at the wrong end of the table at the moment.
Does it worry me Worry is probably the wrong word, but it's something that nobody enjoys looking at.
The only way to get out of it and start moving up the table is to win football games.
We did that a couple of weeks ago, we won two, but there's no consistency of performance.
We need to find that, and find the right formula to give us some consistency.
Source: Northern Echo
Source: Northern Echo