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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always 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 transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.