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Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't worry finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of the Dane'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. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically material, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something in this process.