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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of content turns. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (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 Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a viral chart conveniently stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all losing something here.