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Imagine this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that several of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer 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 opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at 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 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 famous analysts duel passionately on a podcast 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

Despite this I loved watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience here.