Benjamin Sesko: The Latest Victim of Football's Relentless Cycle of Opinions and Memes

Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you manage social media for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

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, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. 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 influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.