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Imagine the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, place that with a sad-looking Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed an open goal. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is the enemy. Now, add statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it everywhere.

Would you point out that Højlund's tally features scores in the premier European competition while his counterpart does not compete in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute podcast featuring the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. No one needs that. Simply make sure "weird" and "the player" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my preferred times to observe football. The leaves swirl, the wind turns, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same 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. The German talent has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision now.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold definitive judgment, allowing technical development and strategic understanding to develop. And the demand to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United to date. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, found the net twice, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue thrillingly on a popular show over whether he needs 10 goals to be deemed successful this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like twelve or thirteen (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a powerful, screeching sports car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom 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 "brutal verdicts" are handed down in about the time it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space 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 chart conveniently informed us that Sesko had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, influencers, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically operating along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of playing in the center of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a major institution that must constantly be generating the big feelings. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been desiring footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Now, just a few weeks in, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Should we start to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker necessary? What was the purpose of another expensive buy?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces their rivals on the weekend: a team simultaneously on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. The striker an expensive flop. The coach losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, incapable to disconnect from the saline drip of takes and further hot takes. It may be Sesko bearing the brunt at present. However, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.