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Imagine the following: a smiling 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 a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you manage online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods 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. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, 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 ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. 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 inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.