🔗 Share this article

Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest 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 short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.