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Imagine the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not worry locating an actual photo of that miss; background information is the enemy. Then, include some goal stats in a big, comical font. Don't forget the emojis. Post it across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's goal count features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. And would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is far superior to Slovenia and creates many more chances. You manage online for a major brand, raw engagement is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material spins. Your next task is to sift through a 44-minute interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Just ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the headline. People will be furious.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

The heart of fall has long been one of my favourite periods to watch 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 season ahead are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the quadruple yet. All teams are still in the game. At this precise point, anything is possible.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, opinions must be formed immediately. The City winger is resurgent. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Benjamin Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let layers of technical texture and strategic understanding to develop. And the imperative to produce instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, context-free criticisms and meaningless contrasts, a square that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive evaluation of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a grand total of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this season (one pundit), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I enjoyed watching Sesko at Leipzig: a big, screeching sports car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the leeway to miss. And in part 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 pre-roll ad, the club with the largest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this over the national team pause, when a viral chart handily informed us that Sesko had been judged – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the press are by no means alone in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: everybody with skin in the game is now basically aligned along the same principles, an environment deliberately geared for controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless sluice of irritation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that every single thing about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be packaged and exchanged.

Indeed, in part this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the narrative, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, partly this is a temporary malaise, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, many of those same players are already being disdained as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need their striker wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on Sunday: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at their stadium in the Premier League and somehow in their own situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the storyline of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we view it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and more takes. It may be this player bearing the brunt right now. However, everyone is losing a part of the experience in this process.