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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. 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 read about 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. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom 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 "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for 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 aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.