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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores 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 were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" 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 over the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience here.