🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, 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 lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for 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? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.