🔗 Share this article

Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. 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 handed down in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically material, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing something here.