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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you manage social media for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, 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, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down 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 opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest 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 ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.