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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Do not bother finding a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you note that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? We need an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded 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 at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing something in this process.