🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And would you note that several of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a viral chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is losing something in this process.