🔗 Share this article

Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you manage online for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral chart handily stated that the player 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 such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.