🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. You manage online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe 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 planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long 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 reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing something in this process.