Brais Méndez, pick of the Panda Team, takes Real Sociedad to new heights

“They been waitin’ for this shit for a long time, didn’t they?”

There was once a gang of best mates who spent pretty much all day, every day hanging about together and were really quite good at football. A bunch of kids who reached the playoffs for the country’s senior, professional second division, they played for Celta de Vigo B but called themselves The Panda Team after the track by Desiigner that begins with that line above and became their song, an anthem for another Galician generation that was going places. All sorts of places. Andorra, Morocco, Poland, Cyprus, Greece, Portugal the Netherlands, Nottingham Forest and even out the game entirely.

Six years on from their finest season together, the culmination of a journey they mostly spent cracking up on the bus, only one is left in the first team in Vigo – and Kevin Vázquez hasn’t appeared yet this season – but look near the top of primera or glance at the goalscoring charts, and although they too had to move, two more are still there tearing it up. The only two to have played in Spain’s top flight. Everyone knows about Borja Iglesias, the now-Betis striker who was the oldest and took the Panda nickname with him, but he always insists he does so in honour of all of them and if only Robert Lewandowski has scored more than him, he only has one more than former teammate Brais Méndez.

And Brais is a midfielder.

On Sunday evening, Brais slid in to steer the ball through Gero Rulli’s legs and give Real Sociedad a 1-0 victory over Villarreal that took them to a fifth consecutive win – three in La Liga, two in Europe – and level with the Champions League positions. Eight weeks into a new season at a new club, it was also his fourth game scoring in a row and took him to five