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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a big, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview with Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, 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, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United so far. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the freedom to miss. 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 about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, 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 deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.