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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more chances. You run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar 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. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? We need an answer 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 need to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. 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 pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically content, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.