🔗 Share this article

Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You run online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really 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 striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically material, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, 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 desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? 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 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow 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 past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.