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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't worry finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, pure engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. All teams are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are not the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing something in this process.