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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of content turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on 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 top performer in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint 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 mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast 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. And in part 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 gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? 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 players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing something in this process.