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Imagine this: a happy Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko sporting United's jersey, looking as if he just missed a sitter. Do not bother finding a real picture of him missing; background information is the enemy. Now, include some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Post the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Of course not. Nor would you highlight that four of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is far superior to Sesko's Slovenia and creates far more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, raw interaction is your livelihood, Manchester United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

Thus the cycle of content spins. The next job is to scan a lengthy interview featuring Peter Schmeichel and find the part where he describes the signing of Sesko "weird". Just before, where Schmeichel qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... well, remove that part. Nobody needs that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" are paired in the title. The audience 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, the teams and tactics are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the coming months are staking their claims. The summer market is closed. No one is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are still in the game. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although 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 at this moment? We need a decision now.

The Player as The Prime Example

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, unavoidable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free condemnations and pointless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

It is not my aim to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has been in the lineup on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What precisely are we analysing? And do I propose to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a podcast over whether Sesko needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it's really more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I loved watching Sesko at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a forward, playing in a team ideally suited to his talents: given the license 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 "harsh judgments" are handed down in about the time it takes to load a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most pitiless gulf between the time and air he needs, and the opportunity he is going to get.

There was a case of this during the national team pause, when a viral infographic conveniently informed us that the player had been judged – by a wide margin – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an environment deliberately nosed towards provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What are we doing to us? Do we realize, on any level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our minds? Quite apart from the essential weirdness of being a player in the center of it all, aware on some surreal chain-reaction level that each aspect about them is now basically material, commodity, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because it's Manchester United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must constantly be producing the strong emotions. However, partly this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly observed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. All summer long we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the point of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he 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 situation of feverish crisis, like submitting a a report on a person who popped to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak an expensive flop. Arne Slot bald.

Perhaps we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that occurs in the backdrop while we scroll through our devices, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and more takes. It may be this player taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience in this process.