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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. If you manage online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to attack 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 handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.