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Picture the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he's missed a sitter. Don't worry locating an actual photo of him missing; background information is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of the Dane's goals came against Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. If you run social media for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times 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 shut. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the best player in the league right now? Please an answer now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of opinions and memes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be circled.

I do not propose to offer a in-depth analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has started four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to replicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs 10 goals to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to rampage but also the freedom to miss. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a widely shared infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Are we aware, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially material, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those same players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who went to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. Alexander Isak waste of money. Arne Slot bald.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that occurs in the background while we browse through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.