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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while 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 top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded 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 "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.