🔗 Share this article

Imagine the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more chances. You run online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral chart conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically material, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is losing something here.