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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place it with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a big, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And would you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a large outlet, pure engagement is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes 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"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, 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 mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

However, for many of the same 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 major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts duel passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards controversy.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, knowing on some surreal butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.