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Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction 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 sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, 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. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. 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 not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United so far. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. Partly 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 pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.