Benjamin Sesko: The Latest Casualty of Soccer's Relentless Cycle of Opinions and Memes

Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't worry finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

The Player 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 delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license 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 "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand 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 reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience here.