🔗 Share this article

Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. You manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.