Benjamin Sesko: Another Casualty of Football's Relentless Conveyor Belt of Hot Takes and Memes

Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.