Samuel Essende reaches ten goals after nine rounds

Samuel Essende has made an unusually prolific start to the league season with Young Boys. In its September 21 assessment, the Swiss Football League credits him with ten goals after nine Super League rounds in 2026/27, the second-highest total at that stage since 2003.

The only stronger opening cited by the league is Arthur Cabral’s eleven goals for Basel in 2021/22. Essende is ahead of Brown Ideye’s nine in 2009/10 and Darío Lezcano’s nine in 2015/16. The comparison concerns the first nine rounds, not the outcome of a completed season.

The league’s analysis of the period from February 22 to September 19, 2026 also shows a sharp change in output. Essende went without a goal in his first eleven matches, covering 696 minutes, then scored fourteen and supplied three assists in the next eleven, from mid-May onwards. That fourteen-goal sequence spans two seasons and must not replace his ten-goal total at the start of 2026/27.

The single-season benchmark remains Jean-Pierre Nsame’s 32 goals for Young Boys in 2019/20. Essende’s return puts his opening run among the competition’s strongest, without yet establishing a numerical challenge to that final record. Whether he can sustain the pace is a question for the remainder of the campaign.