Sesko: Another Victim of Soccer's Unforgiving Conveyor Belt of Hot Takes and Memes

Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with 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, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also 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 reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester 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 mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license 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 load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing something here.