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Imagine this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

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 technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why 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 watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not alone in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the big feelings. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.