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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother locating an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And would you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. You run social media for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one wants that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, 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 still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about 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. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared 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. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly 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 stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, product, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting 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 situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe 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 whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.