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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, 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 highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose 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 Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something here.