🔗 Share this article

Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all losing something here.