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Picture the following: a smiling Rasmus Højlund in a Napoli shirt. Next, juxtapose it with a dejected Benjamin Sesko in a Manchester United kit, looking as if he's missed a sitter. Don't worry finding a real picture of that miss; context is your adversary. Then, include statistics in a large, silly font. Don't forget the emojis. Share the image across all platforms.

Will you mention that Højlund's tally includes strikes in the Champions League while his counterpart isn't playing in Europe? Certainly not. Nor would you highlight that four of the Dane's goals were scored versus weaker national sides, or that Denmark is much stronger to Slovenia and creates many more scoring opportunities. If you run social media for a major brand, pure interaction is what pays the bills, United are the biggest draw, and context is your sworn enemy.

So the wheel of online material spins. The next job is to sift through a lengthy interview with the legendary goalkeeper and extract the part where he calls the signing of Sesko "strange". There's a bit, where he qualifies his remarks by saying, "Nothing negative to say about Benjamin Sesko"... yes, cut that. No one needs that. Simply ensure "weird" and "Sesko" appear together in the headline. People will be furious.

This Time of Potential and Premature Judgment

The heart of fall has traditionally one of my favourite periods to observe football. Leaves fall, winds shift, squads and strategies are still fresh, all is novel and yet everything is beginning to form. The stars of the season ahead are staking their claims. The summer market is shut. No one is mentioning the quadruple yet. Everyone are in contention. Right now, all is possibility.

However, for similar reasons, mid-autumn has long been one of my least favourite times to read about football. Because although no outcomes are decided, something must always be getting settled. Jack Grealish is reborn. Florian Wirtz has been a major letdown. Is Antoine Semenyo the best player in the league at this moment? We need an answer now.

The Player as Patient Zero

In many ways, Sesko feels like Patient Zero in this context, a player caught between football's two countervailing, non-negotiable forces. The imperative to withhold final conclusions, to let technical development and tactical sophistication to mature. And the demand to generate permanent definitive judgment, a constant stream of takes and jokes, context-free criticisms and pointless comparisons, a puzzle that can not truly be circled.

I do not propose to provide a in-depth evaluation of Sesko's stint at United to date. He has been in the lineup four times in the top flight in a wildly inconsistent team, scored two goals, and taken a grand total of 116 touches. What exactly are we evaluating? Nor do I propose to replicate Gary Neville's and Ian Wright's seminal masterwork "Argument Over Benjamin Sesko", in which two famous analysts argue thrillingly on a podcast over whether he needs ten strikes to be a success this year (one pundit), or whether it is more like 12 or 13 (the other).

A Harsh Reality

Despite this I loved watching him at his former club: a big, fast racing car of a striker, playing in a team pitched perfectly to his abilities: afforded the license to rampage but also the freedom to fail. Partly this is why Manchester United feels like the cruellest place he could possibly be at the moment: a place where "brutal verdicts" are summarily issued in about the time it takes to watch a pre-roll ad, the club with the widest and most ruthless gap between the time and air he requires, and the opportunity he is going to get.

We saw a case of this during the national team pause, when a widely shared infographic conveniently stated that Sesko had been deemed – decisively – the worst signing of the summer transfer window by a survey of 20 agents. And of course, the media are not the only ones in such behavior. Club channels, online personalities, unidentified profiles with a suspiciously high number of fake followers: everybody with a vested interest is now essentially aligned along the same principles, an ecosystem explicitly geared for provocation.

The Psychological Toll

Endless scrolling and tapping. What is happening to ourselves? Are we aware, on any level, what this infinite stream of aggravation is doing to our brains? Separate from the essential weirdness of being a player in the middle of this, aware on a bizarre butterfly-effect level that each aspect about players is now essentially content, commodity, public property to be repackaged and exchanged.

Indeed, partly this is because United are United, the entity that continues to feed the cycle, a major institution that must always be generating the strong emotions. But also, in part 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. Throughout the summer we have been coveting footballers, eulogising them, drooling over them. Yet, only a handful of games later, many of those very players are already being disdained as failures. Is it time to be concerned about a new signing? Did Arsenal actually need Viktor Gyökeres wise? What was the purpose of Randal Kolo Muani?

The Bigger Picture

It seems fitting that he meets their rivals on the weekend: a team at once on a long unbeaten run at their stadium in the league and somehow in their own state of feverish crisis, like filing a a report on someone who popped to the store 30 minutes ago. Too open. Their star past his prime. Alexander Isak 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 itself, to influence the way we watch it, an entire sport repivoted around talking points and reaction, an activity that happens in the background while we browse through our phones, incapable to disconnect from the constant flow of takes and more takes. Perhaps Sesko taking the hit at present. But in a way, everyone is sacrificing something here.