🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you note that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. You run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, 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. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this during the national team pause, when a viral chart conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part 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 temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.