🔗 Share this article

Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time 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 everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, 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 imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. 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 precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker 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 inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.