🔗 Share this article

Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, 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. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time 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.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.