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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Do not worry locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly 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 scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning 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 least favourite times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, 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 offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means alone 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 aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be producing the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something here.