🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. You manage online for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically material, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. 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?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is losing something in this process.