Sesko: The Latest Casualty of Football's Unforgiving Cycle of Hot Takes and Memes

Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You run online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn 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. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. He has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling 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 a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.