Benjamin Sesko: The Latest Victim of Soccer's Unforgiving Conveyor Belt of Hot Takes and Memes

Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not bother finding a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And would you note that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If 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.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces 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" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester 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 load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps 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 whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.