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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper 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, cut that. No one wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load 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 viral infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part 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, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.