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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not bother finding a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. You run social media for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new 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. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he faces 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 went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand 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 reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.