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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? Please 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, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, 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 "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to attack 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 "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone 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 essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. However, we're all losing something here.