🔗 Share this article

Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run social media for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times 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 staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, 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 imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom 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 handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.