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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls 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. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, 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 a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", 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 (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. 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 watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared 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. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing something here.