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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Promise and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at 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 had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (Neville), 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 sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: afforded the license to attack but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest 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 pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, public property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring players, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at home in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on a person who went to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah past his prime. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.