🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. You run online for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester 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 short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is losing something here.