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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother finding an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, add statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart isn't playing in continental tournaments? Certainly not. And will you note that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more chances. If you run online for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Just ensure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while no outcomes are decided, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need an answer immediately.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless contrasts, a square that can never truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his abilities: afforded the freedom to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly 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 pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this during the international break, when a viral chart handily stated that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. And of course, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, product, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the window has closed. Throughout the summer we have been desiring players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being dismissed as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a a report on someone who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.