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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, 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. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly 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 any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating 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, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.