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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, 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, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. 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 reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.