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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. 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 an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.