🔗 Share this article

Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. You manage social media for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United to date. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that Sesko 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 not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach 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 whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing something here.