🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.