🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, influencers, 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 geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.