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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you manage online for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken 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 "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces their rivals 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 submitting a a report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.