🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor will you note that several of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. You run online for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics 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 closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint 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 taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate 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 he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest 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 pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – 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, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned 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 Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something here.