🔗 Share this article

Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you run online for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" 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 time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.