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Imagine 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, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry locating a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Now, add statistics in a large, silly font. Remember some emoticons. Share the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while Sesko isn't playing in Europe? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more chances. You manage online for a major brand, raw interaction is what pays the bills, United are the prime target, and context is your sworn enemy.

Thus the wheel of online material turns. Your next task is to scan a 44-minute interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. No one wants that. Just make sure "weird" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience will be outraged.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

Mid-autumn has long been one of my favourite times to observe football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are planting their flags. The summer market is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. Right now, all is possibility.

Yet, for similar reasons, this period has also been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a crushing disappointment. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? We need a decision now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The need to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the imperative to generate instant definitive judgment, a constant stream of opinions and jokes, out-of-context criticisms and meaningless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

It is not my aim to provide a in-depth analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we analysing? Nor do I propose to duplicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, screeching racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the license to rampage but also the freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to watch a short advertisement, the club with the largest and most ruthless gulf between the time and air he requires, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the international break, when a viral infographic handily stated that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. And of course, the media are by no means the only ones in such behavior. Team social media, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a oddly high number of pornbot followers: all parties with skin in the game is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an environment explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Scroll, scroll, tap, scroll. What is happening to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this infinite sluice of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the inherent strangeness of being a player in the middle of it all, aware on some surreal butterfly-effect level that each aspect about them is now essentially content, commodity, open-source property to be packaged and exchanged.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be generating the big feelings. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of judgment most clearly and harshly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting players, eulogising them, salivating over them. Now, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are now being disdained as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need their striker necessary? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that Sesko meets Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 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 went to the store half an hour ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has started to replace football itself, to inflect the way we watch it, an whole competition repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the backdrop while we scroll through our phones, unable to disconnect from the constant flow of opinions and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, we're all losing something in this process.