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

Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless 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 national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.