🔗 Share this article

Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at 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 will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.