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Imagine this: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You run online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, 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 technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, 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 pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot 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 whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.