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Picture this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, 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 title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked 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 crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: 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 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 load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly 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 us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.