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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, 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. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar 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. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press 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: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now 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 feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.