Sesko: Another Casualty of Football's Relentless Cycle of Hot Takes and Internet Jokes

Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You run online for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars 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, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. 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 transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all losing something in this process.