Sesko: The Latest Victim of Football's Unforgiving Conveyor Belt of Hot Takes and Internet Jokes

Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage online for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him 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 freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.