OTD: ELIEZER MAYENDA BORN

On this day in 2005, current Sunderland striker Eliezer Mayenda was born in Zaragoza, Spain.

Mayenda began his career with a local lower division Spanish side called Ebro from the age of five before he moved to France in 2013 playing in the academies of a couple of teams prior to joining Sochaux six years later.

It was at Sochaux where he made his professional debut and he’d go on to play 16 times and score once for their senior team and play 14 times and score four for their B team. He made a bit of club history as well, as he became the youngest player ever to sign a professional contract for Les Lionceaux.

In years gone by a talent such as Eliezer Mayenda probably wouldn’t have even been noticed by our recruitment, which was mostly based on managerial preference and whatever our scouts could find out in the field. A striker playing a handful of games in the lower divisions of France doesn’t cause much notice. In the summer of 2023, we brought in numerous young players and Mayenda was one of them. He was also one of four strikers but he was quite far down the pecking order. Mason Burstow had previous EFL experience, Luis Hemir was a goal machine in preseason and Nazariy Rusyn had a decent amount of experience in Ukraine’s top flight.

As a result of this, in his first season, he barely featured. Tony Mowbray was determined to a fault to see Burstow’s form in training translate into goals in matches and Rusyn and Hemir were his two other favoured options. However towards the end of Mowbray’s reign he was given three appearances off of the bench and a start at home to Huddersfield. The managerial change after this sent him backwards though, with him being given 11 minutes of game time in Mike Dodds’ first temporary spell of the season and then a grand total of 24 minutes under Michael Beale prior to him being sent out on loan north of the border.

His time out on loan at Hibernian was a tad pointless, he played just four games and only 45 minutes at most in one go. He couldn’t even get a game for their youth teams. In contrast, Necatorios Triantis, who was also out on loan at Hibs, managed to make a name for himself and they even loaned him back the following season. Add to this a narrative that our strikers had been failing on Wearside, because they had quite frankly, and it seemed like Mayenda would never make it in Sunderland colours. It was easy to forget though that he was still a teenager and he had plenty of time to turn things around.

That’s exactly what he’s done as well, even if there have been moments of doubt this season he’s always come through them a better player. It was surprising that he was favoured ahead of Rusyn at the start of the campaign by Regis Le Bris and it seemed a bad decision when he couldn’t score vs Cardiff City on the opening day but he put most of those doubts to bed when he netted a brace in our first home match against Sheffield Wednesday. He quickly followed this up with two assists away to Portsmouth (one of which was a certain goal for him robbed on the line by Alan Browne) but then he had a period out of the team due to injury. He struggled to get back into the swing of things a bit and there were some grumbling about how good people actually thought he was.

There was the missing of an absolute sitter of a header at the Britannia Stadium and he missed a one-on-one chance at the death to win the game at Ewood Park in back to back games (in reverse order). The young striker got back to his best though, scoring and assisting in the same game as we beat Sheffield United, assisting the winner in the next match and scoring a winner away to Derby. Challenged for game time by Isidor throughout the season, with both of their forms being better at different times, he’s done well to challenge someone much older than him. To end the season he netted two against Sheff Wed again and then two more in the rest of the regular season. That brought his total to eight goals in 38 games in all competitions with the playoffs still to go at the time of writing.

He saved the best for last as well, his goal against Bristol City saw him sprint from our own box to their box, tussling past several opposition players in the process before finding the back of the net. Next season, should we remain in the Championship, his goal tally will surely be far north of eight.