Benjamin Sesko: Another Victim of Soccer's Unforgiving Cycle of Hot Takes and Internet Jokes

Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and generates far more chances. You manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. 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 still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest 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 largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.