Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post it everywhere.
Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. You run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.
Thus the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.
The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.
Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need a decision now.
And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.
I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate 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 podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).
For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down 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 going to get.
There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.
Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.
And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?
It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.
Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.
