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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. You manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot 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 inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. However, everyone is sacrificing something here.