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The first thing you need to do is find a photo of Rasmus Højlund looking happy in a Napoli shirt. There you are. Now you find a photo of Benjamin Sesko looking sad in a Manchester United shirt. Like he’s just missed an open goal. No, obviously you don’t need to find a photo of him missing an open goal. The less context here, the better. Now pop the photos side by side. Overlay the goal stats in big buffoonish font. Don’t forget the emojis. Post to all social media channels.
Will you mention that Højlund’s tally includes goals in the Champions League while Sesko is not competing in Europe at all? You will not. Nor will you mention that four of Højlund’s goals have come against Belarus and Greece, or the fact that Denmark are a much better team than Slovenia and create many more chances. You run socials for a big media brand, pure liquid engagement is what puts food on your table, United are the biggest meal of all, and as ever, context will be your sworn enemy.
So the wheel of content turns. Your next job is to scan the 44-minute interview Peter Schmeichel gave to a BBC podcast and find the bit where he talks about the signing of Sesko being “weird”. There’s a bit just before he says that, where Schmeichel pre-qualifies his comments with the words: “I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko” … yeah, strip that bit out. Nobody needs that. Just make sure you get “weird” and “Sesko” together in the headline. People will be furious.
Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times of year to watch football. The leaves swirl and the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone is still in the game. At this precise point of the season, all is possibility.
Yet for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times of the year to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, and something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please, Mr President. The planes are in the air. We need a decision now.
And for numerous reasons Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football’s two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, in order to allow layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.
I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko’s time at United so far. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville’s and Ian Wright’s seminal masterwork in the field, “Argument Over Benjamin Sesko (2025)”, in which two of England’s leading pundits duel thrillingly on the Stick to Football podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it’s really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).
For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly at his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why 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 pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.
We saw an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic by the Athletic handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.
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Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.
And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing, a big club that must always be generating the big feelings. But also in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?
It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.
Perhaps 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 talking points and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we’re all losing something here.
