🔗 Share this article

Imagine the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You run online for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate 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 popular show over whether he needs ten strikes 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 loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly 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 watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.