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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; context is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You run online for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period 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 reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest 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 pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing something here.