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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, juxtapose that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry finding an actual photo of him missing; context is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience in this process.