Reports suggest Manchester United are hoping to sign Benjamin Sesko this summer. We take a look at his promising numbers and the all-round threat he could bring to Old Trafford.
It probably shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise that Benjamin Sesko has attracted so much attention from England this summer.
Nearly two metres tall, lightning quick and possessing a thunderbolt of a shot, he looks a lot like the perfect Premier League striker. Watching him in action, it would seem that adjusting to the physical challenge that comes with playing in England’s top flight should not be too much of a problem for him.
And after Arsenal toyed with the idea of signing him earlier this summer, a tug of war developed between Newcastle United and Manchester United, and the latter are now reportedly the likeliest to strike a deal.
Arsenal decided to go for the more developed option and signed 27-year-old Viktor Gyökeres from Sporting CP. At 22, Sesko still has a lot more refining to do to his game, and perhaps the Gunners didn’t want to wait around for that to happen.
The Slovenia international has vast potential, though, and he is also hardly a complete novice, so there is plenty of reason for Man Utd to feel positive about the possibility of a move.
Sesko is already a very good all-round forward, just as happy coming short to receive the ball to feet and contribute to his team’s build-up as he is hanging on the shoulder of the last defender and looking to get in behind.
His game has developed significantly in his two years at RB Leipzig, whom he joined from partner club Red Bull Salzburg in 2023.
In his first season in Germany, Sesko’s performances suggested he was going to become a single-minded goalscoring machine. Aged just 20 for most of 2023/24, he scored at a rate of 0.82 goals per 90, the third best in the Bundesliga behind Harry Kane and Serhou Guirassy (both 1.14).
He did his best work close to goal, with 13 of his 14 Bundesliga goals coming from inside the penalty area, and he also ranked fourth in the league for the proportion of on-ball actions (17%) that were made in the opposition’s box (of players with 500+ touches).
Then, last season, he showed how much more there is to his game than scoring goals with his contributions in different parts of the pitch. He got on the ball more frequently but touched it close to goal less, dropping to 39th for the proportion of touches he took in the opposition box (9.7%).
He also shot less from inside the box (2.4 per 90 down to 1.5 per 90) and scored far fewer of his goals from close range. Of the 12 players with 12+ Bundesliga goals in 2024/25, only Bayern Munich winger Michael Olise (66.7%) scored a lower proportion from inside the box than Sesko (76.9%). Among the same group, Sesko took a lower proportion of his shots from inside the box than anyone else (63.2%).
The natural result of spending less time close to goal is that he scored fewer goals. In 2024/25, Sesko scored one fewer (13) than he did the season before (14) despite playing almost 15 hours less football.
Part of the reason he likes to get on the ball outside the area is that he can score incredible goals from a long way out. Like this one…
He strikes the ball incredibly sweetly, and scores all kinds of goals. Across his two seasons with Leipzig, the split of his 25 non-penalty goals between right foot (13), left foot (four) and head (eight) gives an indication as to the variety to his finishing game.
Many of his goals follow some kind of explosive movement, and often that’s a burst of pace. According to the Bundesliga’s official website, he posted the 26th-fastest top speed in the competition last season, clocking in at 35.7 km/h, behind only a handful of strikers and just 1.5 km/h slower than the fastest player in the league (Eintracht Frankfurt’s 20-year-old midfielder Jean-Mattéo Bahoya, 37.2 km/h). In the Premier League last season, his pace puts him roughly in line with Gabriel Martinelli and just behind Erling Haaland.
Comparisons with Haaland have been unavoidable, largely because of Sesko’s size, build, eye for goal and development first at Salzburg and then in Germany. But while the signs in 2023/24 suggested the Slovenian was developing a similarly focused goalscoring game, he now appears to be adding more to his arsenal. That is not even to begin to suggest Sesko is better than Haaland, but there may be more variety to what he does.
While his strikes from distance are eye-catching, they don’t represent the most sustainable source of goals. In 2023/24, he overperformed compared to his non-penalty expected goals to a greater extent (+6.3) than any other player in the Bundesliga. Last season, his overperformance dropped to +2.7, still a good return but the 20th best in the league and much closer to the norm.
If we look only at non-penalty shots from inside the box, thereby excluding Sesko’s long-range bangers and spot-kicks, we perhaps get a better idea of how good his finishing is.
In the Bundesliga last season, Sesko scored eight non-penalty goals from inside the penalty area from shots worth 6.47 xG, giving him an overperformance of 1.53, the 33rd best such rate.
Having also outperformed his xG the season before, though, this suggests better-than-average finishing and therefore plenty for United to potentially work with. The issue with Sesko, however, is that his numbers suggest he didn’t get into dangerous positions enough.
He posted just 8.31 non-penalty expected goals all season, giving him a rate of 0.31 xG per 90. That’s exactly the same as United forward Joshua Zirkzee managed in the Premier League last season, and fans complained persistently about his lack of goal threat. Should Sesko move to Old Trafford, Ruben Amorim may well want to get him into better goalscoring positions more consistently. That would be helped by the fact he’d be the lone forward for United, rather than playing up front in a two like he did at Leipzig.
He also shows his age a little in his patchy goalscoring. He scored half of his 14 goals in 2023/24 in a seven-game scoring streak as he became the youngest player since Rudi Völler in 1982/83 to net in seven consecutive Bundesliga matches. And then last season, he had runs of scoring five goals in four games and seven in eight, but also endured separate runs of three goals in 11 games and one in 10.
In summary, if United are to succeed in their Sesko pursuit, they would be getting a hugely exciting centre-forward with a wicked shot and plenty of potential, but one who requires work.
Would they be getting the penalty-box poacher, the goal machine to rival Haaland, who so many fans think they need? Not initially, at least, that’s for sure.
So, does that matter?
United aren’t, unlike Arsenal, in the position where they need to win right now. They aren’t on the verge of being good enough to win the biggest competitions in the world; they aren’t buying a centre-forward to complete the puzzle. In that sense, they can afford to invest in Sesko’s future and hope he eventually develops into the player they need.
They have also invested heavily in their front three already this summer, with the arrivals of Matheus Cunha from Wolves and Bryan Mbeumo from Brentford. Those are two players who provide plenty of goal threat of their own and also like to rotate positions with their teammates constantly.
Cunha is a left-sided attacker but was Wolves’ greatest goal threat last season, with only seven players scoring more in the Premier League than him (15).
Mbeumo is a workhorse whose movement could fit perfectly with Sesko’s preference to drop deep. He made more runs in behind the opposition when his team had the ball than anyone else in the Premier League (418) in 2024/25.
Having already signed two proven Premier League goalscorers for the wide positions in Amorim’s 3-4-2-1, it’s reasonable for those at Old Trafford to hope there will be less need for their centre-forward to hit 20 goals in his debut season.
They will, however, maintain hope that Sesko can become the great goalscorer he has hinted he could be, rather than just a scorer of great goals.
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