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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly 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 largest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing 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 cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah 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 started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience here.