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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Do not bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor 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 many more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel 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 in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn 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. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

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 taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, 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 poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.