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Imagine the following: a happy the Danish striker wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place that with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; background information is the enemy. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Remember the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally includes scores in the premier European competition while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor will you note that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. You manage online for a major brand, pure interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the wheel of online material spins. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the coming months are staking their claims. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, this period has also been one of my most disliked times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. Jack Grealish is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision now.

Sesko as The Prime Example

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, allowing layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to mature. And the demand to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to offer a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. The guy has been in the lineup on four occasions in the Premier League in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? And will I attempt to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's 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 year (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 powerful, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the freedom to attack but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be right now: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the international break, when a viral chart conveniently informed us that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Team social media, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now basically material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must constantly be producing the big feelings. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, 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, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as failures. Is it time to worry about a new signing? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at home in the Premier League and yet in their own state of feverish crisis, like submitting a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Maybe we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition reoriented around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to detach from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit right now. But in a way, we're all losing something here.