🔗 Share this article

Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor will you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you run social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.