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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Then, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. You manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to observe 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 season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest 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 going to get.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – 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 such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all losing something in this process.