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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run online for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been 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 everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long 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 reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's 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 a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded 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 right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, 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 it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all losing something in this process.