Sesko: The Latest Casualty of Football's Relentless Conveyor Belt of Opinions and Memes

Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. You run social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.