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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a sad-looking the Slovenian forward in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, include statistics in a large, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Would you point out that Højlund's goal count includes scores in the Champions League while Sesko does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor will you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and creates many more chances. You manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the prime target, and context is the thing to avoid.

Thus the cycle of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where he qualifies his comments by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, cut that. Nobody needs that. Just make sure "strange" and "the player" are paired in the headline. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to watch football. The leaves swirl, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, all is novel and yet patterns are emerging. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. Nobody is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, 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, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is resurgent. The German talent has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? Please a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, non-negotiable forces. The need to delay definitive judgment, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a conveyor belt of takes and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's time at Manchester United to date. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits duel thrillingly on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching him at Leipzig: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: 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 ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

There was an example of this over the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a survey of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the identical rules, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What are we doing to ourselves? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Quite apart from the inherent strangeness of playing in the center of it all, knowing on a bizarre chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a pendulum of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting players, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, many 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 point of another expensive buy?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team simultaneously 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the shops 30 minutes ago. Defensively suspect. Mohamed Salah finished. The striker waste of money. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, something that occurs 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 right now. However, everyone is losing something in this process.