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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Do not worry finding an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.