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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And would you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn 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. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "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 year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.