🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates 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 online material spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract 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, remove that part. No one needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.