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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a big, silly font. Remember the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run online for a large outlet, pure interaction is your livelihood, 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 lengthy podcast featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my preferred periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to consume news on football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league right now? Please a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like the archetype in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to generate permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? Nor will I attempt to replicate the pundits' notable debate "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 season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are handed down in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about players is now basically material, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that continues to feed the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most clearly and cruelly observed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has started to replace football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and reaction, something that occurs in the backdrop while we browse through our devices, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.