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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko 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 the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

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 entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing something here.