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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

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 talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving 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 pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is losing something here.