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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating an actual photo of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. And would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You run online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? And will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch 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.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means alone in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, commodity, public property to be packaged 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 big feelings. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on Sunday: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has started to replace football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all losing something in this process.