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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

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. And would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more chances. You manage online for a major brand, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred periods 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. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable 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 notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart handily stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe 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 entire sport reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.