🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe 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 coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero 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 imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly 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 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a viral chart handily stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. 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 inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.