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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 an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more chances. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (Neville), 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 powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom 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 summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap 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 widely shared chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home 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. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps 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 discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing something here.