🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you run online for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why Manchester 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 short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – 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, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some 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, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically content, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating 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? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.