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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of the Dane's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

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

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. He has started four times in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.