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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although 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 best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the leeway 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 roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, 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.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically material, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing something in this process.