🔗 Share this article

Picture this: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. You run online for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although 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? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically content, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.