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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Then, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. 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 featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", 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 season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

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 brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically material, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.