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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of content turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And will I attempt to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps 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 view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is losing something in this process.