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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you mention 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 Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you run social media for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast 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"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars 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 no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.