Benjamin Sesko: Another Victim of Football's Unforgiving Conveyor Belt of Opinions and Memes

Imagine the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely 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 of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" 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 patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks 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 same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

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 view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.