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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

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 tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned 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 some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is losing something in this process.