Benjamin Sesko: Another Victim of Football's Relentless Conveyor Belt of Hot Takes and Internet Jokes

Imagine the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not worry locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long 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. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium 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 shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.