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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't bother locating a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, silly font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while Sesko does not compete in Europe? Of course not. And will you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of content turns. The next job is to sift through a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, anything is possible.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to consume news on 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. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and memes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can never truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a mere of 116 touches. What precisely are we analysing? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the leeway to miss. And in part 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 roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the patience and space he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this over the international break, when a viral chart handily 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 by no means alone in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately geared for controversy.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It seems fitting that Sesko meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah past his prime. Alexander Isak waste of money. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, unable to detach from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, we're all sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.