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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. You manage social media for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger 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, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, 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 a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.