🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not bother finding a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. You manage online for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period 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 resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

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 strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.