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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother locating an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license 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 at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling 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 a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.