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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor 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 argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license to attack but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience here.