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Imagine the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not worry finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, 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 resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's 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 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are not the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the store 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 narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing something here.