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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not worry locating a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more chances. You run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players 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, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us 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 press are not the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all sacrificing something here.