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Picture this: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, place that with a dejected the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't bother locating a real picture of him missing; context is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a large outlet, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy podcast with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. Nobody wants that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my preferred periods to observe football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The transfer window is shut. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, 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 reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? And will I attempt to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two of England's leading pundits duel passionately on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to attack but also the leeway 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 summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the press are not alone in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

And yes, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be generating the big feelings. However, 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, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, many of those same players are now being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and yet in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an entire sport reoriented around discussion topics and immediate responses, something that occurs in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and more takes. Perhaps this player bearing the brunt right now. However, we're all sacrificing something in this process.