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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more chances. If you run social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (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 sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum 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, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.