Sesko: The Latest Victim of Football's Relentless Cycle of Opinions and Memes

Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not bother finding an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition 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 needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license 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 "harsh judgments" are summarily issued 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 requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion 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 players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.