Eliezer Mayenda joined Sunderland during a summer window where a lot of pressure was put on the club to bring in strikers.
Ross Stewart was injured, and many goals in the 2022/2023 season came via our midfielders and wingers. Mayenda was one of four strikers brought in during the summer of 2023 and with the benefit of hindsight, he’s easily the only one that even came close to making an impact.
In the seasons that followed, Mayenda has stood out with great vibes and flashes of fantastic ability, and during
our 2024/2025 Championship promotion season, he came into his own — particularly in the second half of the campaign.
His contributions in the playoff run — the winner in the first leg of the semi-final at Coventry and then the goal to bring us level at Wembley — will live long in the memory of many Sunderland fans, as will his iconic celebrations and cutting around the Wembley turf while wearing sunglasses.
Mayenda joined Sunderland relatively early into our efforts to (contrary to popular belief) win stuff with kids, and he was often surrounded by the likes of Chris Rigg and Jobe Bellingham as part of a side that rarely had much experience in it.
However, despite going in at the deep end and ending his first year as a Sunderland player out on loan at Hibernian, Mayenda developed into an exciting and dependable player who played some of his best football out on the right hand side.
A personal favourite memory of Mayenda was his incredible solo run at Bristol City last April, which only had the shine taken off it because we ended up losing that afternoon.
Being stood in the away end at Ashton Gate, Mayenda picked up the ball and ran away from us, and just kept on running. I’m not sure now; not even one City defender stopped him, and there was a moment near the penalty area where it looked as though he’d run out of steam.
However, there was nothing to worry about. His calm finish after a mazy run summed up what he could do when he was on form, and it’s moments like this that will make his departure harder than others.
On top of all this, he is another of the Championship promotion squad to leave the club, a group of players that gave us so much joy just over twelve months ago. Yet this is football; Sunderland didn’t stand still last summer, and instead of battling relegation, we qualified for Europe.
The club will look to keep on moving forward, and to fetch over twenty million euros for a third-choice striker that’s been hit and miss as a Premier League striker after buying him for less than one million euros is very good business, whichever way you look at it.
Mayenda was a fun player to watch at Sunderland, and whilst you could argue he wasn’t given a totally fair crack last season, it’s hard to argue with the decisions of the hierarchy and the results.
We’ll always have the iconic celebrations and goals.
Eliezer, you leave Sunderland with the best wishes of us all. Hopefully he’ll absolutely smash it over in France, and he can look back in years to come at a successful career that was given a jump-start on Wearside.
