🔗 Share this article

Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not bother finding a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods 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. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all losing something here.