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Picture this: a happy the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Next, place it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you note that several of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. You run online for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger 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.

The Player as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "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 season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to fail. And in part this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that continues to feed the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and harshly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets Liverpool on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a a report on a person who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football the actual game, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, we're all losing a part of the experience here.