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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run online for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar 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. The German talent 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 Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.