🔗 Share this article

Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same 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?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing something in this process.