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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. 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 a decision now.

The Player 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 delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged 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 big feelings. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.