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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You run online for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps 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 reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing something here.