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Picture the following: a happy Rasmus Højlund wearing Napoli's colors. Next, place it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, appearing like he just missed an open goal. Do not bother locating an actual photo of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, add some goal stats in a large, comical font. Remember some emoticons. Share it everywhere.

Will you point out that Højlund's tally features strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart does not compete in continental tournaments? Certainly not. Nor would you note that several of the Dane's goals were scored versus Belarus and Greece, or that his national team is much stronger to Sesko's Slovenia and generates many more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a major brand, raw engagement is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and nuance is your sworn enemy.

So the cycle of content turns. Your next task is to scan a lengthy interview featuring the legendary goalkeeper and find the part where he describes the acquisition of Sesko "weird". There's a bit, where Schmeichel prefaces his comments by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. Nobody wants that. Simply ensure "strange" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be outraged.

The Season of Potential and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has traditionally one of my favourite periods to watch football. Leaves fall, the wind turns, squads and strategies are newly formed, everything is new and yet patterns are emerging. The stars of the season ahead are planting their flags. The transfer window is closed. No one is talking about the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

However, for many of the same reasons, this period has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. For while nothing has yet been settled, something must always be getting settled. The City winger is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league at this moment? We need a decision immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like the archetype in this respect, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, allowing layers of technical texture and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to produce instant verdicts, a conveyor belt of opinions and jokes, out-of-context condemnations and meaningless comparisons, a square that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at Manchester United so far. The guy has started on four occasions in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, found the net twice, and had a mere of 116 contacts with the ball. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be deemed successful this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Cruel Environment

For all this I loved watching him 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 freedom to miss. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the most unforgiving place he could possibly be right now: a place where "harsh judgments" are summarily issued in roughly the duration it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most pitiless gap between the patience and space he needs, and the time and air he is going to get.

We saw an example of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic handily informed us that the player had been deemed – decisively – the poorest acquisition of the recent market by a poll of 20 agents. Naturally, the press are not the only ones in this. Club channels, online personalities, anonymous X accounts with a suspiciously high number of pornbot followers: all parties with a vested interest is now essentially operating along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Mental Cost

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on some level, what this endless sluice of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the inherent strangeness of playing in the middle of it all, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about them is now basically material, commodity, public property to be repackaged and traded.

And yes, partly this is because United are United, the entity that keeps nourishing the cycle, a big club that must always be producing the big feelings. But also, in part this is a seasonal affliction, a swing of judgment most visibly and harshly glimpsed at this time of year, roughly four weeks after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, salivating over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, a lot of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about Jamie Gittens? Was Arsenal's purchase of their striker wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It feels appropriate that he meets their rivals on Sunday: 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 filing a a report on a person who went to the shops half an hour ago. Defensively suspect. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. Arne Slot losing his hair.

Maybe we have not yet quite grasped the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football the actual game, to inflect the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and immediate responses, something that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, incapable to detach from the constant flow of takes and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing a part of the experience here.