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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Do not bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. You run online for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked 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 top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, 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 instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: 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 miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart handily stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run 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 went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is sacrificing something here.