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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. If you manage social media for a major brand, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar 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. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing 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 continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all losing something here.