Manchester United head coach Ruben Amorim accepts £73.7m striker Benjamin Sesko has struggled at times in his first few weeks at the club but urged him not to take criticism from club legends personally.
Sesko has scored two goals in his first 11 appearances for United.
He last found the net against Sunderland at Old Trafford on 4 October and his performance at Nottingham Forest last weekend prompted former skipper Gary Neville to declare the Slovenia international was “miles off it” compared to fellow new arrivals Matheus Cunha and Bryan Mbeumo.
Amorim does accept there is substance to Neville’s comments. However, he also feels they lack the context of Sesko moving to a new league at the age of 22, having only spent two seasons in the Bundesliga with RB Leipzig.
“I’m relaxed,” he said. “[But] he’s not relaxed.
“I understand how things are in football and he’s going to struggle. That is normal. He has no experience here.
“The first impact [is] when everyone says that you are so good, you are the next big thing and you hear that about Sesko.
“Then you come to one club that is the hardest club. If you don’t perform every week, you are going to hear a lot of things from club legends, from pundits, from the media – and sometimes they are right.
“Of course, nobody likes to hear but he struggled a little bit, and that is a fact. So, let’s embrace that.
“It is hard to hear but it’s not personal. It’s an opinion that is going to change in three weeks. Everything that is true today, in three weeks, could be a lie.”
Sesko is understood to be spending huge amounts of time at United’s Carrington training ground as he gets an understanding of the performance levels he is delivering compared to those he is required to meet.
He often arrives more than 90 minutes earlier than the normal meeting time of 09:45 and does not leave until 16:00, long after most of his team-mates.
United sources remain confident they made the right decision to sign Sesko, while at the same time sending Rasmus Hojlund on loan to Napoli, even though the Dane has scored four times in nine appearances for the Italian champions.
“Ben is a young kid, a control freak,” said Amorim.
“He wants to control everything – and he’s not going to control everything.
“He has more potential than I was thinking [but] we need to understand how he likes to play and also to put in our ideas.
“I’m quite relaxed with that. He is going to be our striker for the long term but he’s going to have these struggles and these bumps during the ride. That is a normal thing in football.”
