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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the title. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for similar 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 resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

The Player 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 delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce permanent definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at United so far. He has started four times 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 precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral infographic handily stated that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are not the only ones in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all sacrificing something here.