🔗 Share this article

Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include 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 Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. You run social media for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times 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 planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, to let 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 criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom 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 about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.