🔗 Share this article

Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred times to watch 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 season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. 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 summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something here.