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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was a case of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.