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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Do not bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports 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 Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.