🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest 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 ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.