🔗 Share this article

Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits 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 Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps 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 backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.