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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't bother finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, 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. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin 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, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. He has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a striker, 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 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 largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any 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 a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the store half an hour 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 the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, we're all losing something here.