Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.
Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.
So the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.
Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.
Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.
And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.
It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).
Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest 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 largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.
We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.
Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.
And yes, 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 strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?
It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.
Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.
A tech enthusiast and gaming aficionado with over a decade of experience in digital media and content creation.
