🔗 Share this article

Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred 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 transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "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 season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart handily stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all losing something here.