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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You run online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, 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 closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total 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 of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" 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 needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing 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.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe 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 whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience here.