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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also 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 reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

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, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: 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 ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.