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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a major brand, pure engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". 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. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable 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 Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom 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 at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly 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

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

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 reaction, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing something here.