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Picture the following: a smiling the Danish striker in a Napoli shirt. Now, juxtapose that with a dejected the Slovenian forward sporting United's jersey, appearing like he just missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of him missing; background information is your adversary. Now, add some goal stats in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Post the image everywhere.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally features scores in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. And would you note that several of Højlund's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and generates far more scoring opportunities. If you manage online for a large outlet, raw interaction is your livelihood, United are the biggest draw, and context is the thing to avoid.

So the cycle of online material turns. Your next task is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the acquisition of Sesko "strange". Just before, where he prefaces his remarks by saying, "I have nothing bad to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, remove that part. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the title. People will be outraged.

The Season of Promise and Hasty Opinions

Mid-autumn has long been one of my preferred periods to watch football. Leaves fall, winds shift, the teams and tactics are newly formed, everything is new and yet everything is beginning to form. Key players of the season ahead are staking their claims. The transfer window is shut. Nobody is mentioning the multiple trophies yet. Everyone are in contention. At this precise point, all is possibility.

Yet, for many of the same reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my most disliked 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. Could Semenyo be the top performer in the league right now? Please an answer immediately.

Sesko as Patient Zero

And for numerous reasons, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player inextricably trapped between football's opposing, unavoidable forces. The need to delay final conclusions, allowing technical development and tactical sophistication to develop. And the imperative to produce permanent verdicts, a constant stream of takes and memes, context-free condemnations and pointless contrasts, a puzzle that can not truly be solved.

I do not propose to provide a substantive analysis of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has started four times in the top flight in a highly unpredictable team, scored two goals, and had a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor will I attempt to duplicate the pundits' notable debate "The Sesko Debate", in which two of England's leading pundits argue passionately on a popular show over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this season (Neville), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (Wright).

A Harsh Reality

For all this I enjoyed watching him at Leipzig: a big, screeching racing car of a forward, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his talents: given the freedom to rampage 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 summarily issued in about the time it takes to load a short advertisement, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he needs, and the time and air he is likely to receive.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared chart handily stated that the player had been deemed – by a wide margin – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a poll of football representatives. Naturally, the media are by no means alone in this. Team social media, influencers, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: all parties with a vested interest is now basically aligned along the identical rules, an ecosystem explicitly nosed towards controversy.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Do we realize, on some level, what this endless stream of irritation is doing to our minds? Separate from the essential weirdness of playing in the middle of this, knowing on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that every single thing about players is now essentially material, product, open-source property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the corpse that keeps nourishing the narrative, a big club that must always be generating the strong emotions. However, in part this is a temporary malaise, a pendulum of opinion most visibly and cruelly glimpsed at this season, about a month after the transfer market shut. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, praising them, drooling over them. Yet, just a few weeks in, a lot of those same players are now being dismissed as broken goods. Should we start to worry about Jamie Gittens? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres necessary? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

A Wider Issue

It feels appropriate that Sesko faces Liverpool on the weekend: a team at once 13 months unbeaten at home in the league and somehow in their own state of perceived turmoil, like filing a missing person’s report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star finished. The striker an expensive flop. The coach bald.

Perhaps we have failed to understand the way the narrative of football has begun to supplant football itself, to influence the way we view it, an whole competition repivoted around discussion topics and immediate responses, an activity that happens in the background while we scroll through our devices, unable to disconnect from the saline drip of opinions and further hot takes. Perhaps Sesko bearing the brunt right now. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.