🔗 Share this article

Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce 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 offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.