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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And would you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

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 talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued 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 time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media 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 a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.