🔗 Share this article

Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more chances. You run online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly 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 essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically material, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing something here.