🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe 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 entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.