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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

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 delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless 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 United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue 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 loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, 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 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Club channels, 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 geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly 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. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.