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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, add statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. If you run online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview with Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped 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 produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to attack but also the leeway to fail. Partly this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: 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 gap between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a widely shared chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, 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, 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. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that he faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.