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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that several of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

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 delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started four times 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? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue 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 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to attack 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 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 opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

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 whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.