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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko 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 enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic handily informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is sacrificing something here.