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

Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run online for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about 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? We need an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, 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 mature. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest 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 gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented 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. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.