🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight 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 generates far more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content turns. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn 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. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is losing something here.