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Picture this: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, place that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he's missed an open goal. Do not bother locating a real picture of that miss; background information is your adversary. Then, include some goal stats in a big, silly font. Don't forget some emoticons. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals came against weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates far more chances. You manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and nuance is the thing to avoid.

Thus the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. Nobody is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to consume news on football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? Please an answer now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to delay final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a square that can never truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at United to date. He has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like twelve or thirteen (the other).

A Cruel Environment

Despite this I enjoyed watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to attack but also the freedom to fail. And in part this is why United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the summer transfer window by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are by no means alone in such behavior. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Are we aware, on some level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this time of year, about a month after the window has closed. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, praising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of perceived turmoil, like submitting a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the store half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe 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 entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. It may be Sesko taking the hit at present. However, everyone is sacrificing something here.