Sesko: Another Victim of Soccer's Unforgiving Cycle of Opinions and Memes

Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note 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 scoring opportunities. 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 wheel of content turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.