🔗 Share this article

Picture the following: a smiling 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 that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. You manage online for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies 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 closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same 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. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

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

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run 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 popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is losing something here.