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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed an open goal. Do not bother finding an actual photo of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Would you mention that Højlund's goal count features strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And would you highlight that four 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 social media for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "strange" and "the player" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the demand to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful 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 his former club: a powerful, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the freedom to attack 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 about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he requires, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the international break, when a viral chart conveniently stated that the player had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the press are not alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that every single thing about them is now basically material, product, public property to be packaged and traded.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, partly this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.