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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. You run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? 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 duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved 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 license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks 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 dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot 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 reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.