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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. You run online for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, 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. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: 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. 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 handed down in about the time 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.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically material, commodity, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all sacrificing something here.