If Romaine Mundle’s standout moment in a Sunderland shirt came against Preston during the 2024/2025 season, salvaging a 1-1 draw with a cracking finish after the Lilywhites had parked the bus, a fleet of taxis and several horsedrawn carriages as they sought to spoil the game and frustrate the life out of us, surely Simon Adingra’s high water mark in red and white was reached several months later with a sumptuous curling finish during an entertaining 1-1 home draw with Leeds.
Mundle had first arrived
at the Stadium of Light in January 2024; a young, and raw winger from Standard Liege, whereas Adingra was arguably the one of our “blue chip” signings during the 2025 summer window, an AFCON hero with top flight experience and theoretically the kind of nimble and tricky wide man that could pep up the Sunderland attack.
Granted, he didn’t come cheaply by our standards, but such were the market rates that we opted to take the plunge.
At the time, Adingra’s signing made perfect sense for a newly-promoted Premier League side and although Mundle had suffered dreadful misfortune with injuries during his time on Wearside, there was genuine hope that the man who picked up the baton from Jack Clarke during the 2024/2025 promotion campaign could make the step up into the top flight.
However, with the 2026/2027 season merely a matter of weeks away and no new attacking signings yet confirmed, both players now find themselves in challenging positions.
They’re by no means positioned with one foot out of the door, but you could argue that they’ve got a battle on their hands to either reignite their Sunderland careers or to secure moves away the Stadium of Light. Should the latter happen, they would both depart with everyone’s best wishes and the chance to begin a positive new chapter elsewhere, but I don’t think we’re at that stage just yet.
Of the two, I do feel that Adingra has the greater top flight potential.
However, will that ever be fully realised as part of a Sunderland side in which our forwards are expected do their share of defensive work as well as asking questions of opposition defences when driving towards goal? Perhaps not, but I do want to stress that he could very well adapt his game accordingly and it’s all within his hands.
Give Adingra open space and backtracking opposing full backs, and he can be mightily influential; ask him to spend more time heading in the opposite direction in a tougher game and you probably won’t see the best of him. Enzo Le Fée embodies the combination of skill and work rate that Régis Le Bris looks for in his attackers and I’d love to think Adingra could take some inspiration from that, but it’s very much a fifty-fifty call.
I must say that at times last season, Mundle — about whose physical durability for the Premier League I’ve long had concerns — was the subject of criticism that went beyond the pale and was occasionally deeply troubling to read.
Did he struggle amid the hustle and bustle of the Premier League, and can his decision-making often fall short of the degree of sharpness you need at this level?
Yes, but the wings are positions of concern anyway, even more so now that Bertrand Traoré has moved on, and you could hardly blame Le Bris for tinkering when he felt necessary as he tried to strike the right balance.
We’ve yet to fully crack that particular code but productive World Cup campaigns for Chemsdine Talbi — yet another player with whom a continental club (Red Bull Leipzig) have recently been credited with an interest in — and Nilson Angulo have offered hope that we might be onto something.
Talbi is trickier, blessed with excellent control and possesses far more defensive discipline than you might expect, whereas Angulo is taller, rangier and perhaps slightly less refined in his attacking style — of which we saw evidence during his display at Goodison Park towards the back end of last season. For 2026/2027, I’m excited to see what Talbi can do given a run of games. Angulo feels like more of a ‘wildcard’, but both have talent in abundance.
Of course, were Adingra and Mundle to depart, the question of how much we could hope to sell them for would be at the top of the agenda.
A modest profit on Mundle may be achievable whereas the same may not be true of Adingra (a loan switch to West Ham would at least provide him with regular football and potentially boost his future resale value), but this is the way it goes in the Premier League — some deals bear fruit in the short and long-term and others don’t, in which case, absorbing the occasional loss is all part of the deal.
Two players whose futures are very much up in the air, but let’s hope it works out for the best for everyone concerned.
