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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? 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 Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". 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 needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage 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 pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.