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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And would you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why 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 load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey 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 oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.