🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling 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's missed a sitter. Do not worry finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. If you manage social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also 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 best player in the league right now? Please a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral chart handily stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is losing something here.