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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, 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. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. 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 roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an environment explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.