Sesko: The Latest Casualty of Soccer's Unforgiving Conveyor Belt of Opinions and Internet Jokes

Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: 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 freedom to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically material, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all losing a part of the experience here.