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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. You run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose 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 taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely 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 duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.